Shaping the Future of Data Ecosystem Research—What Is Still Missing?

Abstract

To share data, more and more companies work together in interorganizational networks called data ecosystems (DEs). Research on DEs has grown significantly over the past ten years. Owing to the research field’s recent growth, interested scholars and practitioners might find it difficult to keep up to date with the diverse research field dealing with DEs. In this article, we conduct the first bibliometric study on DE research and collect and quantitatively analyze the research within this field. As a result, we come up with a synthesized overview of the most relevant research constituents. Furthermore, we analyze the thematic structure of DE research and show the most frequently addressed topics and key themes. We found that DE research can be divided into five different thematic clusters. Based on these results, we finally develop a future research agenda that can help advance research on DEs and guide interested scholars. As such, our article summarizes and consolidates the existing knowledge on DEs and provides suggestions for its further development.

Keywords

• Bibliometric review
• data ecosystem
• data sharing
• interorganizational network
• quantitative analysis