Abstract

Small and Medium Enterprises play a crucial role in growing the economy of developing, emerging, and developed countries. With South Africa experiencing the highest unemployment rate, SMEs are known for eradicating that and bringing about innovation. Digitalisation has led enterprises and people to generate massive big data that can be used for gaining insights, making predictions, descriptions, and prescriptive. The use of big data can increase the revenue and productivity of the enterprise. Big enterprises often manage to adopt and implement big data as they have the resources to do so. Unfortunately, SMEs are reluctant to adopt and implement due to limited resources. For enterprises to embrace big data they should have a roadmap that they will follow. This study followed a bibliometric analysis where Scopus databases were used for analysis are 118. The purpose of the bibliometric analysis was to outline the research trends for the adoption of big data by SMEs following the TOE framework theory for the past 5 years dating from 2019. Network, overlay, and density visualisation are outlined in this study. Together with coauthorship. It was found that Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, and Australia are leading with the number of publications. South Africa is in the top 12 countries that have contributed more. It is recommended that there must be support for scholars in the discipline. Future studies should focus on action research where the TOE framework theory is tested for its effectiveness when adopted and implemented by SMEs implementing big data analytics.