Understanding the Evolution of Environment, Social and Governance Research: Novel Implications From Bibliometric and Network Analysis

Given the scarcity of comprehensive review studies in the literature, this bibliometric analysis thrives on taking a scientific approach to delivering quantitative and qualitative information on the ever-evolving field of ESG. Utilizing the performance analysis and science mapping techniques which includes citation analysis, co-word analysis, the study reports a holistic overview of 693 (ESG) papers from 1991 to 2020. The paper aims to provide a unified perspective on the evolution and further identify future research directions in this field. The findings point to the most important countries, authors, studies, and top journals in this field. Results show that published articles on ESG gained momentum after 2006; however, an exponential rise is being observed in the past 5 years, with research focusing on sustainable finance, sustainable development, ESG, and CSR with themes extending to risk management, stakeholder engagement, and portfolio construction, among others. Furthermore, the research identifies how the practice of ESG reporting affects many variables such as financial performance, social performance, environmental performance, and sustainability score. The findings also indicate that the field of ESG is still evolving, with numerous unexplored themes. The work is novel and relevant on the pretext that it uses the Scopus and Web of Science databases for bibliometric mapping, whereas previous studies have used the Scopus database but have lacked a robust methodology, so the findings of this study provided strong support for identifying emerging paradigms in the ESG literature.