Big data analytics and innovation in e-commerce: current insights and future directions

Big data analytics (BDA), as a new innovation tool, played an important role in helping businesses to survive and thrive during great crises and mega disruptions like COVID-19 by transitioning to and scaling e-commerce. Accordingly, the main purpose of the current research was to have a meaningful comprehensive overview of BDA and innovation in e-commerce research published in journals indexed by the Scopus database. In order to describe, explore, and analyze the evolution of publication (co-citation, co-authorship, bibliographical coupling, etc.), the bibliometric method has been utilized to analyze 541 documents from the international Scopus database by using different programs such as VOSviewer and Rstudio. The results of this paper show that many researchers in the e-commerce area focused on and applied data analytical solutions to fight the COVID-19 disease and establish preventive actions against it in various innovative manners. In addition, BDA and innovation in e-commerce is an interdisciplinary research field that could be explored from different perspectives and approaches, such as technology, business, commerce, finance, sociology, and economics. Moreover, the research findings are considered an invitation to those data analysts and innovators to contribute more to the body of the literature through high-impact industry-oriented research which can improve the adoption process of big data analytics and innovation in organizations. Finally, this study proposes future research agenda and guidelines suggested to be explored further.