Researching Big Data

As many of you may know, we're in the midst of an amazing speaker series here at SFU on Big Data: the President's Dream Colloquium on Engaging Big Data has already brought us three speakers since January, with another event at our Surrey campus this  afternoon (Interacting with Information through Visualization), and three more to come later this term, capped by a keynote at the QE Theatre in March by Edward Snowden.

In the midst of all that big data excitement, I see that some of our Communication researchers here at SFU have just published a cool article in which they "conduct a systematic review on “big data” across business scholarship over the past six years (2009–2014)":  

Frizzo-Barker, J., Chow-White, P. A., Mozafari, M., & Ha, D. (2016). An empirical study of the rise of big data in business scholarship. International Journal of Information Management, 36(3), 403-413. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijinfomgt.2016.01.006

This research team looked at "219 peer-reviewed academic papers from 152 journals," so, aside from reading the article for their research findings, I suspect that their references will be one of the best possible places to look if you are diving into research on this topic and need a starting point.

Speaking of starting points, check out these SFU Library resources on Big Data:

1. eBooks and print books: 

• Pre-run search of our library catalogue
• Samples: 
  • Big data and analytics : strategic and organizational impacts
  • Reshaping society through analytics, collaboration, and decision support : role of business intelligence and social media
  • Data science and big data analytics:  Discovering, analyzing, visualizing and presenting data

2. Journals such as...  

• Big Data Research 
• Journal of Big Data 
• (I've only grabbed the most directly relevant titles for this list, but we do, of course, carry hundreds of other journals on topics ranging from Database management to Data processing to  Management information systems.)

3. Relevant databases such as...

• ACM Digital Library (start with a phrase search for "big data" to explore)
• IEEE Xplore (again, try "big data" to get almost 7000 hits)

Of course, this only barely scratches the surface... any list of SFU Library resources on Big Data would be, well, BIG!  :-) 

Always happy to share more resources and search strategies if needed. 

-- MarkB

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Mark Bodnar

mbodnar@sfu.ca

Business & Economics Librarian

Image credit: Reprinted without changes from: Graph representing the metadata of thousands of archive documents, documenting the social network of hundreds of League of Nations personals. Published in: Grandjean, Martin (2014). "La connaissance est un réseau". Les Cahiers du Numérique 10 (3): 37-54. About: http://www.martingrandjean.ch/archive-reseau-visualisation-donnes-sciences-humaines/ Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.