From our research into this area we conclude that IQM, is in the process of evolving into a new research area in its own right having satisfied the ‘new research criteria’: it has a significant number of university researchers working in the area i.e.; has yearly ICIQ conference proceedings; has demonstrated support for increasing research in the area by way of journal articles, and books publications; and has the IAIDQ (International Association for Information and Data Quality) available to partner the research area and help exploit research results. Analysis of Figure 1, Figure 2 and Figure 3 show from the year 2000 a declining trend of references to TQM authors and the rising trend in referencing IQM authors, which further suggest that even though TQM underpins IQM, IQM is maturing into a new research area, building up a repository of literature quite distinct from the TQM authors to which the IQM authors make reference to. This can also highlighted in Figure 3, where we demonstrated the inter-referencing between IQM authors. There is an already a steady trend of IQM authors directly referencing the IQM knowledge base and only indirectly referencing the TQM gurus. From the literature reviewed we find that IQM fulfils the basic criteria of a new research area and conclude it also fulfils the referencing criteria as proven in this paper.