An approach to aid understanding emerging research fields—the case of knowledge management

Emerging research fields bring confusion to many people. This paper puts forward an approach, based on domain analysis and journal mining, to aiding people to get an overview of an emerging research field. The approach extends the traditional domain analysis method by adding two additional aspects: objectives and applications , and explores six essential issues regarding a research field, which include: why the research field is necessary, what enables its birth or triggers actions on it, what it deals with, how to implement it, how to support it, and where it has been applied. After introducing the approach, this paper gives a case study of applying it to explore the knowledge management (KM) field.