Abstract: Using information technology, professional virtual community brings together geographically dispersed, like-minded people to form a network, in which users can interact with each other, and generate new contents. Professional virtual community, containing a lot of data, information and valuable professional knowledge, has become an emerging knowledge source. It advocates open, reciprocal norm of knowledge sharing, breaking the traditional closed pattern of knowledge management. Thus professional virtual community catches the attention of the enterprise managers and scholars. Reviewing the literature published in international mainstream publications, this article summarizes the research achievements of professional virtual community success model, knowledge seeking, knowledge contribution, and bidirectional usage, and discusses the problems in these studies. Based on the results of literature review mentioned above, this article proposes a knowledge creation model of professional virtual community which divides the knowledge creation process into knowledge contribution, knowledge verification, knowledge seeking and values internalization in sequence. The new model illustrates the law of knowledge creation in professional virtual community through the description of explicit/tacit knowledge transformation, personal/public knowledge transformation, and searchers/contributors transformation. Finally, the article gives specific suggestions for the future research.

Key words: professional virtual community, knowledge seeking, knowledge contribution, knowledge verification, knowledge creation