5. Discussion and conclusions
In this study, we present an overview of the distribution of publications on big data and business processes by conducting a bibliometric and network analysis review of articles written during the period 2006–16. To extract relevant studies, we searched for papers in the WoS database using predefined keywords. We screened papers by analysing their titles and abstracts and removed those that violated the inclusion criteria. To provide an overview of big data and business process status, we identified a primary set of 49 articles. The results of our study identify the key contributing authors, countries, affiliations and keywords across a broad spectrum of disciplines.
We can see from the bibliometric results that a large majority of the 49 primary studies were carried out in United States of America (approximately 50%), while only 2–4% were done in Switzerland and Austria. We therefore recommend that these countries should put more research effort into improving their business processes by recognising the potential of big data. Our findings also note that relatively low number of publications have appeared in this field. From Figure 1 we can see a rapid increase in publication numbers in the field of big data and business processes since 2012. This clearly demonstrates a growing interest in this area, which is unsurprising for a relatively new concept.
