Exploring Research Trends in Big Data Across Disciplines: A Text Mining Analysis

Using big data has been a prevailing research trend in various academic fields. However, no studies have explored the scope and structure of big data across disciplines. In this article, we applied topic modeling and word co-occurrence analysis methods to identify key topics from more than 36,000 big data publications across all academic disciplines between 2012 and 2017. The results revealed several topics associated with the storage, collection and analysis of large datasets; the publications were predominantly published in computational fields. Other identified research topics show the influence of big data methods and techniques in areas beyond computer science, such as education, urban informatics, business, health and medical sciences. In fact, the prevalence of these topics has increased over time. In contrast, some themes like parallel computing, network modeling and big data analytic techniques have lost their popularity in recent years. These results probably reflect the maturity of big data core topics and highlight flourishing new research trends pertinent to big data in new domains, especially in social sciences, health and medicine. Findings of this article can be beneficial for researchers and science policymakers to understand the scope and structure of big data in different academic disciplines