Epistemetrics: Conceptual domain and metrics of knowledge management

By and large, the emerging field of knowledge management has mainly contained a variety of attempts to define the field, to explain its core components and to discuss its relevance and utility to organisations. Much of this literature is replete with normative narratives, albeit with some narrative cases of implementation. There is a lack of a cohesive set of research questions and even more striking, there is a lack of an appropriate and generally accepted methodology and means of measuring the process and outcomes from knowledge management. This paper describes the sub-field of Epistemetrics: the metrics of knowledge. It fills the need in the literature of having a coherent system to measure knowledge. Epistemetrics is a domain composed of three inter related parts: what we measure in knowledge management; how we measure, and why we measure (what is the value generated from knowledge management). This paper focuses on the topic: how we measure.