Highlights

Abstract

Keywords

۱٫ Introduction

۲٫ Methods and data

۳٫ Results

۴٫ Discussion

۵٫ Conclusion

CRediT authorship contribution statement

References

Abstract

Information management is the management of organizational processes, technologies, and people which collectively create, acquire, integrate, organize, process, store, disseminate, access, and dispose of the information. Information management is a vast, multi-disciplinary domain that syndicates various subdomains and perfectly intermingles with other domains. This study aims to provide a comprehensive overview of the information management domain from 1970 to 2019. Drawing upon the methodology from statistical text analysis research, this study summarizes the evolution of knowledge in this domain by examining the publication trends as per authors, institutions, countries, etc. Further, this study proposes a probabilistic generative model based on structural topic modeling to understand and extract the latent themes from the research articles related to information management. Furthermore, this study graphically visualizes the variations in the topic prevalences over the period of 1970 to 2019. The results highlight that the most common themes are data management, knowledge management, environmental management, project management, service management, and mobile and web management. The findings also identify themes such as knowledge management, environmental management, project management, and social communication as academic hotspots for future research.

۱٫ Introduction

The early research on information management (hereafter, IM) reports that it embraces a variety of organizational activities starting from acquiring and integrating the information from various sources to organizing, structuring, and processing the information and finally, disseminating the information to the right person at the right time in an optimal way (Adelman & Kemp, 1970; Beimesch, 1982; Blazewicz, 1983; Brussaard, 1983, 1988; Carter, 1983; Espejo, 1983; Hoard, 1989; King & Maryanski, 1983; Lavallee, 1983; Narimatsu, 1983; Pollak, 1983; Roberts & Clarke, 1989). A few researchers also report that the IM domain is originated from database management, record management, and data processing management (Trauth, 1989). Unsurprisingly, perhaps, most of the early studies in the late-1970s and early-1980s focused on technical aspects of IM focusing on hardware and software development. During that period, the term information resources management (IRM) was associated with the management of information as well as information technologies, which are used for acquiring, storing, processing, and utilizing the information (Cheng, 1987; McClure & Hill, 1982; McClure, 1981; Otten, 1984; Roberts & Wilson, 1987). Subsequently, IM became an intuitively appealing domain to study, research and practice where the information was no more just a ‘processed data’ but it was regarded as an ‘organizational resource’ requiring effective management as other resources like man, machine, material, and money (Tranfield, 1986; Wilson, 1986). While the IRM concept was predominantly about the management of data to meet an organizational need, it could not cover the broad perspective and objective of information management, which were all about helping people and organizations to access, organize, process and utilize information efficiently and effectively.