This article reviews the research on big data as well as journalism and communication from the theory-driven and practice-driven perspectives. According to the reviews, most journalism and communication studies based on the big data approach are data-driven instead of theorydriven. Moreover, these studies usually used the following research methods: dictionary-based text analysis, matching learning, social network analysis, etc. Besides, most relevant studies focus on the correlations between different variables rather than the causality. Finally, the article indicates that to improve the application of big data in journalism and communication research, three relationships should be addressed: the relationship between theory-driven approach and data-driven approach, the relationship between academic frontier issues and Chinese-indigenous issues, and the relationship between online data and of?ine data.