Big data, data science, and analytics: the opportunity and challenge for is research

We address key questions related to the explosion of interest in the emerging fields of big data, analytics, and data science. We discuss the novelty of the fields and whether the underlying questions are fundamentally different, the strengths that the information systems (IS) community brings to this discourse, interesting research questions for IS scholars, the role of predictive and explanatory modeling, and how research in this emerging area should be evaluated for contribution and significance.