In business and finance sector, traditional datasets such as financial statements, SEC filings, etc., are generally distributed officially to statement what an enterprise operating is about. Whereas, alternative data are different, which are gathered from non-traditional sources, generated either by individuals, business processes, or sensors. Alternative data can be used to evaluate an enterprise with more in-depth, more accurate and complete, and more sufficiently timely insights from different views than traditional data. In practice, alternative data have been leveraged by businesses and investors to extract valuable insights, generate business opportunities, improve deal sourcing, and guide investment decisions. Besides, academia researches in this field are becoming increasingly hot and popular in latest years, though it is still in the infancy, and more researches are needed to go into both finding new investment strategies and exploring new theories in finance innovation and business management. In this work, we try to provide an overall investigation of academia researches on the emerging applications of alternative data. We review more than 100 papers published from 2015 to 2021 according to the category of the alternative data and their applications in finance and business. Also, we propose an analysis on the roles of alternative data in view of finance theory and business management, and we argue that alternative data would play an important role in financial markets as a bridge leading the financial markets to more efficient
