Big data analytics and big data science: a survey

Big data has attracted much attention from academia and industry. But the discussion of big data is disparate, fragmented and distributed among different outlets. This paper conducts a systematic and extensive review on 186 journal publications about big data from 2011 to 2015 in the Science Citation Index (SCI) and the Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) database aiming to provide scholars and practitioners with a comprehensive overview and big picture about research on big data. The selected papers are grouped into 20 research categories. The contents of the paper(s) in each research category are summarized. Research directions for each category are outlined as well. The results in this study indicate that the selected papers were mainly published between 2013 and 2015 and focus on technological issues regarding big data. Diverse new approaches, methods, frameworks and systems are proposed for data collection, storage, transport, processing and analysis in the selected papers. Possible directions for future research on big data are discussed.