Exploring the core knowledge of business intelligence

With the rapid development of data analysis, there is few research on the core knowledge of business intelligence system (BIS). In order to fill this research gap, this paper collected the 1003 articles and 31345 references from the Web of Science database, and then applied co-citation analysis and factor analysis, to analyze their core knowledge. We identified 52 highly cited articles and obtained 9 core knowledge categories in the field of BI: BI success, IT acceptance and measurement, big data analysis, data analysis and decision making, business strategy, BIS, consumer behavior, knowledge management, business adoption. Research shows that BISs are still in the growing trend and core knowledge helps researchers and managers better understand the core concepts and relevance of BI, so as to quickly discover possible research directions in this research field and useful applications in the enterprise.