This study traced the fast-changing landscape of study on big data. Three hottest aspects of big data study are: technologies, application to academic study and real value in big data. With the rising of mobile multimedia and social media, more and more data were produced in our daily life. Traditional methods and technologies are inefficient or even powerless facing such large scales of data. Also, academics gained greater abilities to produce much more data than before, but had few good methods of analysing big data. Therefore, new technologies targeting efficient utilization of big data are being proposed, like MapReduce, Hadoop and so on. Methods of applying big data to academic study are also being discussed intensively. Furthermore, the political and business value hidden in big data is very attractive. People believe that although some profits have been made, much more are hidden in big data to be dug out. In this paper, current stage, influential references, outstanding authors, important institutions, top-tier journals and evolution of hot topics are all analysed with help of CiteSpace to map big data study. Finally, forecasting on development of big data study was made to provide help for future study.
['Wei-Guang Wang', 'Xi Zhang', 'Patricia Ordóñez de Pablos', 'Jinghuai She']
Tracing fast-changing landscape of study on big data