Recent Trends on Environmental, Social and Governance Research: A Bibliometric Analysis

Purpose: Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) is becoming a key concept of sustainability around the world. There is a tremendous increase in academic interest in ESG. It is difficult for researchers to structure a large quantity of unstructured data through a structured literature review or meta-analysis. Although, in recent years, many visualization tools have been invented for structuring or visualization of large quantities of literature, yet, there is currently a lack of bibliometric and visualization studies on this subject. To fill this lacuna, this study is conducted to analyse the publication metrics on the ESG literature and to give a research agenda for future research. This study will clarify the conceptual underpinnings of the ESG field serving as a reference for ESG development to help researchers and stakeholders quickly grasp the fundamentals of this subject. Design/Methodology/Approach: An extensive literature review was carried out on ESG spread over the period between 2008 and 2022 published journals identified from online academic databases of Scopus. A total of 701 conceptual and empirical articles were analysed. To achieve the objectives of the study, bibliometric analysis was used. To conduct bibliometric analysis, Biblioshiny application of RStudio and VOSviewer software was used. Findings: This study highlighted key trends, emerging themes and sub-themes by analysing the statistical profile of ESG literature, most productive ESG research journals, authors, countries, keywords and their collaboration status using bibliometric analysis. Research implications: By providing the distribution schema of ESG articles based on different criteria and by providing the future research areas, the present study would help future researchers to understand the current status of ESG research in the business industry as well as in academia and take this research area forward. Originality/Value: This bibliometric analysis provides a holistic view of ESG literature highlighting major research themes and their related sub-themes addressed in the research studies to date.