Knowledge Management And Data Mining: Emerging Business Intelligence Research Subspecialties

Over the past five decades, the area of decision support systems has made a significant progress toward becoming a solid academic discipline. A number of prior studies have been conducted to assess the extent of progress within these stages in the DSS area. Among them, a study of Eom [1] has provided biblio-metric evidence that the decision support system has made meaningful progress over the past four and a half decades (1969-2004). The primary data for this study were gathered from a total of 498 citing articles in the BI area over the past eight years (2005-2012). This study uses author cocitation analysis (ACA). ACA is a technique of bibliometrics that applies quantitative methods to various media of communication such as books, journals, conference proceedings, and so on. Indeed, the results of this study showed the substantial changes in the intellectual structure of BI research. First, many research subspecialties appeared in the previous investigations up to 2004 have disappeared. They are individual differences/user interfaces, model management, and evaluation research during the period of 1969-2004. Second, through this research, we also noticed that the group support systems and foundation research are weakening in terms of the number of researchers and therefore the substantiality of these research topics are diminishing. On the other hand, the focus of business intelligence research is shifting to knowledge management and data mining.