Knowledge management (KM) and data mining (DM) have become more important today, however, there are few comprehensive researches and categorization schemes to discuss the characteristics for both of them. Using a bibliometric approach, this paper analyzes KM and DM research trends, forecasts and citations from 1989 to 2009 by locating headings ‘‘knowledge management’’ and ‘‘data mining’’ in topics in the SSCI database. The bibliometric analytical technique was used to examine these two topics in SSCI journals from 1989 to 2009, we found 1393 articles with KM and 1181 articles with DM. This paper implemented and classified KM and DM articles using the following eight categories—publication year, citation, country/territory, document type, institute name, language, source title and subject area— for different distribution status in order to explore the differences and how KM and DM technologies have developed in this period and to analyze KM and DM technology tendencies under the above result. Also, the paper performs the K–S test to check whether the distribution of author article production follows Lotka’s law. The research findings can be extended to investigate author productivity by analyzing variables such as chronological and academic age, number and frequency of previous publications, access to research grants, job status, etc. In such a way characteristics of high, medium and low publishing activity of authors can be identified. Besides, these findings will also help to judge scientific research trends and understand the scale of development of research in KM and DM through comparing the increases of the article author. Based on the above information, governments and enterprises may infer collective tendencies and demands for scientific researcher in KM and DM to formulate appropriate training strategies and policies in the future. This analysis provides a roadmap for future research, abstracts technology trend information and facilitates knowledge accumulations, therefore the future research can concentrated in core categories. This implies that the phenomenon ‘‘success breeds success’’ is more common in higher quality publications