Knowledge management (KM) and data mining (DM) have become more important today, however,
there are few comprehensive researches and categorization schemes to discuss the characteristics for
both of them. Using a bibliometric approach, this paper analyzes KM and DM research trends, forecasts
and citations from 1989 to 2009 by locating headings ‘‘knowledge management’’ and ‘‘data mining’’ in
topics in the SSCI database. The bibliometric analytical technique was used to examine these two topics
in SSCI journals from 1989 to 2009, we found 1393 articles with KM and 1181 articles with DM. This
paper implemented and classified KM and DM articles using the following eight categories—publication
year, citation, country/territory, document type, institute name, language, source title and subject area—
for different distribution status in order to explore the differences and how KM and DM technologies have
developed in this period and to analyze KM and DM technology tendencies under the above result. Also,
the paper performs the K–S test to check whether the distribution of author article production follows
Lotka’s law. The research findings can be extended to investigate author productivity by analyzing variables
such as chronological and academic age, number and frequency of previous publications, access to
research grants, job status, etc. In such a way characteristics of high, medium and low publishing activity
of authors can be identified. Besides, these findings will also help to judge scientific research trends and
understand the scale of development of research in KM and DM through comparing the increases of the
article author. Based on the above information, governments and enterprises may infer collective tendencies
and demands for scientific researcher in KM and DM to formulate appropriate training strategies and
policies in the future. This analysis provides a roadmap for future research, abstracts technology trend
information and facilitates knowledge accumulations, therefore the future research can concentrated
in core categories. This implies that the phenomenon ‘‘success breeds success’’ is more common in higher
quality publications.