Despite the strategic value of organizational knowledge as a source of sustainable competitive advantage, researchers have voiced their concern over the perceived inaccuracy and undue use of the term knowledge worker in scientific articles. In order to ascertain these perceptions and discuss ways of overcoming this difficulty, we analyzed 223 articles from diverse fields of science that address the theme of knowledge worker. Applying the content analysis technique, we analyzed the definitions identified and the professionals considered by researchers as knowledge workers. The analyses identified the difficulties assumed by the researchers. It was observed that the term was used for occupations and professions with different levels of complexity, including those that were mostly operational, as well as the use of the term without a definition in a significant number of the articles (67.7%). The semantic analysis of the set of actions attributed to knowledge workers aided the proposition of additional descriptors to conceptualize the term. The single appearance of the verb exploit in an article in the field of Geography & Transport led us to imagine it being a reference to the exploitation-exploration dyad in accordance with the concepts of the fields of innovation and learning, which was not confirmed. This fact provided insight for a logical proposition: the link between knowledge workers and the mechanism of organizational knowledge exploration and between information workers and the mechanism of exploitation. Inter-text analyses involving concepts from the fields of knowledge management, innovation and learning indicate that these associations are consistent and pertinent.