Investigating the trend of "Knowledge Acquisition" developments: A Scientometric analysis of Iranian and global research

The main purpose of this study is to analyze the process of science production in knowledge acquisition subject, with a focus on its organizational essence, in scientific resources. Scientometric analysis was used to identify the key ontological themes and concepts of the subject through tools such as co-author, co-word, co-citation, and cluster analysis. The number of reviewed articles was 245 English articles published in ScienceDirect, and 20 Persian articles published in Iranian scientific databases. The period of English and persian articles was from 1979 to 2021. The data collection tools were queries, search databases, indexes, and codes, and the analysis method was scientometric tools and maps using MS Excel and VOSviewer software. The results of general trends show that from the origin of economically developed countries, a higher number of knowledge acquisition articles have been published than other countries. The number of articles from the origin of our country in the international database is very small, that due to the gradual recognition of the importance of organizational knowledge acquisition issues, it is necessary to publish more research with the origin of our country in the international databases. The research findings show that the time trend of publishing knowledge acquisition articles in the world and Iran is increasing with a gentle slope. The co-word networks show the relative centralization and independence of the clusters; as various concepts related to this subject have been formed and evolved and have formed other scientific clusters. This result demonstrates the importance of knowledge acquisition as an important node in information science knowledge networks. Concerning Co-Occurrence networks, it is necessary for researchers in the fields of knowledge management, knowledge integration, knowledge transfer, learning, organizational learning, and knowledge resources, to pay attention to findings of knowledge acquisition research. The timeline of the emergence of keywords in the field of knowledge acquisition shows the maturity of this field in recent years. Based on the findings, it is understood that the discovery and dissemination of new topics and ideas by new researchers in this field are possible and there is no theoretical saturation in the topics of knowledge acquisition. The wide connection of organizational education and organizational knowledge acquisition, and the variety of soft issues related to them, is a significant point for managers, researchers, and policymakers in the field of science and technology.