Big Data and Islamic Finance

Background

Big data can be defined as the tremendous amount of data that can be analyzed using the advanced computer to produce particular patterns, trends, and relationships (Sagiroglu & Sinanc, 2013). Although it was born from the information and technology domain, the application of big data in the business environment has been the concern of many corporations, and it is deemed one of the sources of competitive advantage in the current era (Chen et al., 2018). Also, the studies on big data have been extensively conducted by scholars across the globe (Gandomi & Haider, 2015), both in business settings and others.

Big data technology has been well studied in various fields, such as marketing (Zhao et al., 2019), human resources (El-Kassar & Singh, 2019), operations (Choi et al., 2018; Lu & Xu, 2019), transportation systems (Ghofrani et al., 2018), Internet of Things (Plageras et al., 2018), healthcare (Batko & Ślęzak, 2022; Dash et al., 2019) and Covid-19 case (Awotunde et al., 2021; Wang et al., 2020) The universal purpose of big data has clearly inspired many people in any field to embrace this technology to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of any organization, either profit oriented or non-profit oriented ones. Furthermore, many previous studies have also been recently conducted using a systematic literature review approach on big data. Those studies relate big data to many other aspects, such as tourism (Li et al., 2018; Mariani et al., 2018), supply chain management (Mishra et al., 2018; Nguyen et al., 2018; Rejeb et al., 2022) manufacturing (Cui et al., 2020; Ren et al., 2019), disaster management (Akter & Wamba, 2019; Yu et al., 2018), healthcare (Mehta & Pandit, 2018; Pashazadeh & Navimipour, 2018), text mining in financial sector (Pejić Bach et al., 2019), firm performance (Maroufkhani et al., 2019), transportation research (Kaffash et al., 2021; Neilson et al., 2019), and organization dynamic capabilities (Rialti et al., 2019).

Very few big data studies have been sufficiently published in various journals focusing on Islamic finance. In fact, the general nature of big data can be used either by Islamic or non-Islamic business entities because big data can be considered a religious-neutral application. Therefore, this study aims to review the studies that relate big data and Islamic finance published in the journals indexed in Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar. The two indexes, as mentioned earlier, were selected because they are the most well-known and trusted indexing databases in which many scholars are pursuing to have their papers indexed by them. While the third one, namely, Google Scholar, was selected to enhance the results of the review conducted on Web of Science and Scopus indexes.