Mining publication data

I found treasure! Publication and citation data with metadata (author names, addresses, affiliation): http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/oai.html

I was reading about knowledge management here, which says that knowledge management is nonsense. I agree to a certain degree, not because of the field, but because of its name. How do you manage knowledge? Isn’t knowledge derived? Wasn’t information “science” good enough? (I have problem with “business intelligence” as well…) As the author of that article says, it is a new term coined to attract attention. He does provide some evidence, but I was left unsatisfied.

I thought of performing text mining on publications database, and citeseer has this great resource. I downloaded the data (72 XML files), performed some clean-up, and ran a script to pull citeseer ID, author addresses, and publication dates where the abstract contained the term “knowledge management”. I was interested in seeing the trend of publication and places of publication.

Have a look at this chart:

There is a definite growth in this area, at least in research and publications. It is startling to see a paper published in 1970, and a peak in 2002. As citeseer data ends in 2004, it is possible that it doesn’t have complete publication history of 2004.

Geographic location wise, the US and Europe leads the way in number of publications: