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The aim of this paper is to develop a metric that quantitatively measures the risk of knowledge drain associated with the departure of a member in communities of practice (CoP).

This paper considers two possible cases in which departure of a member has a high risk of causing knowledge drain: when the member is a network leader, and when the member is an isolated expert. Network analysis is used to identify network influence of each member. The proposed metric is designed considering network influence and knowledge level of individual members, and applied to a case study using real-world data from an online CoP.

This paper demonstrates that the proposed metric properly provides information about the members whose departure could cause serious damage to the CoP because of their strong influence or their inactivity in the network. The metric enables practitioners to identify critical members, and to enact precautions to reduce the vulnerability of the CoP.

Compared to the threat of knowledge drain, few studies have attempted to measure the risk associated with departure of a member. This study has developed a metric to measure the risk of knowledge drain in a CoP. The approach and methods of this paper offer a foundation for designing assessment methods for knowledge networks and provide new insights into quantitative research in knowledge management.

This paper aims to provide organizational knowledge management teams with a new metric, the bottleneck impact score (BIS), a valuable tool for evaluating the structural health of communities of practice (CoPs), by detecting the seriousness and pervasiveness of the bottlenecks occurring in knowledge-sharing activities among CoP members.

This paper uses the social network analysis method to analyze the activities of organizational members in CoPs and classify organizational members into four types based on their degree of involvement in knowledge creation and consumption. CoPs are also categorized into four types based on the proportion of member types they contain to identify the characteristics of CoP member types and of CoP types.

Data analysis of the knowledge-sharing activities of 4,414 members from 59 CoPs within one of the largest steel manufacturing companies finds that few CoPs are active in both knowledge creating and consuming and that most CoPs suffer from the insufficient participation of their most experienced employees and experts and hence are vulnerable to master–apprentice and knowledge drain risks.

The proposed BIS metric successfully quantifies the seriousness and pervasiveness of such structural risks and thus can help management teams take preventive action to reduce the identified structural risks.

The purpose of this paper is to accomplish a bibliometric analysis, investigate the underlying knowledge structure, founding and development, and evolution of the Journal of Knowledge Management (JKM) through its articles published between 1997 and 2020.

A total of 1,346 research papers from JKM were selected and VantagePoint^® software was used to generate bubble maps, auto-correlation maps, and matrix maps through techniques such as principal component analysis (PCA) and natural language processing (NLP). The analysis gives insights about the foundation of knowledge structure, its evolution and the development of JKM.

The systematic mapping of research illustrates topics emerging as new offshoots, global favourites, saturated and plateaued and reached academic maturity. The USA, the UK, Australia, Spain, Italy, China, Canada, Germany, and France have contributed the most to JKM. This paper provides a robust roadmap for future research investigation of JKM.

The authors humbly admit the possibility of overlooking some research papers while evaluating and filtering the database of JKM. The research outcome summarizes 23 years, subject to information retrieval from archival files.

This research is a detailed bibliometric analysis explaining paradigm shifts in the body of knowledge of JKM. The bibliometric outcomes can act as beacons for future researchers and academicians to revisit the current trends that shape the domain of knowledge management, particularly for the JKM audience with a focus on contemporary topics of research interest.

This is a unique endeavour to accomplish a systematic bibliometric analysis of the JKM for two decades, offering insights about its structural body of knowledge through an overview of the chronology of scholarly development in the field of knowledge management.