Big Data for Public Domain: A bibliometric and visualized study of the scientific discourse during 2000–2020

Abstract

This article aims to investigate the trend of scientific publications under ‘big data and policy’ research during the last two decades, including the dynamics of the network structure of researchers and the institutions. Bibliometrics is utilized as a tool to reveal the dynamics of scientific discussions that occur through articles, published in international journals indexed/contained in the Scopus database; meanwhile, the analysis visualization is performed by using VOSviewer 1.6.16. The search results indicate that the United States serves as the country of origin for most productive author affiliations in publishing articles, the University of Oxford (United Kingdom) serves as the home institution for most productive author affiliations, and Williamson, B., from the University of Edinburgh (United Kingdom), is considered as the most prolific writer. In addition, the Swiss Sustainability Journal from MDPI is cited as the source for the most widely discussed publication topic in its journals. Further, ‘Big Data for Development: A Review of Promises and Challenges’ is regarded as the article with the most references. Additionally, the most discussed topics on ‘big data and policy’ include smart cities, open data, privacy, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and data science.