Beyond the Numbers: A Bibliometric Analysisof Non-Financial Information Practices

Companies whose core business contributes to social grievances or impacts theenvironment, put their reputation, bottom line, and stock market value at risk, and inextreme cases even threaten their very existence. Studies have shown that environmentaland social issues are now significant "non-financial" aspects with an impact on a companyvalue. Dialogue with stakeholders to achieve or improve sustainability performance is anincreasingly important factor affecting the risk-opportunity constellation and influencingaccess to capital and the cost of capital. Therefore, transparency on sustainability factorsis increasingly emerging as a success factor in corporate finance. There are differentterms around corporate responsibility: Corporate Sustainability (CS), Corporate SocialResponsibility (CSR), Corporate Sustainability Reporting (CSR-D), CorporateCitizenship (CC), Environment Social and Governance (ESG), Corporate SocialInitiatives (CSI), or simply non-financial (NF). In the absence of internationally uniformdefinitions, there are even more interpretations of what they entail. A directive of theEuropean Union from June 2022 regarding corporate sustainability reporting obligationsmight lead to a more standardized way of non-financial reporting methods internationally.This study explores the question of what the above-mentioned concepts mean in terms ofcontent, how they differ and where the respective focal points lie. The aim is therefore toidentify the scientific literature indexed in Scopus with the help of a bibliometric analysisas well as to analyze it to identify the most important topics and their weighting oneconomic sustainability. Another objective is to understand the conceptual structure of thedifferent concepts and to identify the knowledge base for their use in core economicbusiness, i.e., to determine how they are currently used. The originality of this research isthat our approach is unique now and the assimilation of the above concepts is a very clearsign of manifestation for sustainable business.