co-word networks are constructed with author-provided keywords in academic publications and their relations of co-occurrence. as special form of scientific knowledge networks, they represent the cognitive structure of scientific literature. this paper analyzes the complex structure of a co-word network based on 8,190 author-provided keywords extracted from 3,651 papers in five chinese core journals in the field of management science. small-world and scale-free phenomena are found in this network. a large-scale co-word network graph, which consists of one major giant component and many small isolated components, has been generated with the guess software. the dynamic growth of keywords and keyword co-occurrence relationships are described with four new informetrics measures. the results indicate that existing concepts always serve as the intellectual base of new ideas as represented by keywords.