The ubiquity of sensor, computing, communication, and storage technologies provides us with access to previously unknown amounts of data - Big Data. Big Data has revolutionized research communities and their scientific methodologies. It has, for instance, innovated the approaches to knowledge and theory building, validation, and exploitation taken in the engineering sciences. The humanities and social sciences even face a paradigm shift away from data-scarce, static, coarse-grained and simple studies towards data-rich, dynamic, high resolution, and complex observations and simulations. The present focused topic presents investigations from different research fields in which the focus is either on utilizing Big Data or charting the benefits of using such evidence in basic research.