Abstract Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has gained increasing prominence in Indonesia due to the regulatory reforms, sustainability commitments and the rising expectations for the ethical corporate conduct. While the scholarly interest in the CSR has expanded considerably over the past two decades, limited attention has been paid to how this body of research has evolved structurally and how the CSR has been conceptually integrated with Business Ethics in the Indonesian context. Addressing this gap, this study conducts a Scopus-based bibliometric analysis of 634 CSR-related journal articles published between 2005 and 2025. Using the Biblioshiny interface of the Bibliometrix R package, the analysis examines the publication and the citation trends, influential authors and sources, thematic structures, intellectual foundations and the collaboration networks. The results indicate a significant growth in the Indonesian CSR scholarship, particularly following the key regulatory milestones such as the Law No. 40/2007 and the OJK Sustainable Finance Roadmap. The thematic mapping reveals a clear transition from the philanthropic and compliance-oriented CSR toward more strategic and ethically grounded approaches, organized around four dominant clusters: sustainability and ESG integration, ethical governance and accountability, community engagement and empowerment and CSR–performance linkages. The co-citation patterns demonstrate that the Indonesian CSR research is anchored in the globally established theories (such as the stakeholder and legitimacy theories) while simultaneously integrating the locally embedded ethical values, including the collective responsibility (gotong royong). Overall, this study offers a consolidated overview of the evolution and structure of the CSR and Business Ethics scholarship in Indonesia. By clarifying how the global theoretical frameworks interact with the national regulations and the cultural norms, the findings contribute to a deeper understanding of the ethical governance within the emerging market CSR research and provide directions for future studies on the ESG integration and the context-specific CSR practices.
Barry et al. (Mon,) studied this question.