Mapping the environmental, social and governance literature: a bibliometric and content analysis

Purpose This study aimed to quantify and map academic literature of ESG from a bibliometric perspective and to provide a comprehensive review of the recent literature published in the high-rated journal articles.Design/methodology/approach The study analyzed 867 and 388 documents from Scopus and Web of Science (WoS) data respectively using bibliometric analysis. Biblioshiny and VOSviewer software was used for performance analysis and science mapping respectively. Further, manual content analysis of the 190 research articles published in the last five years was conducted.Findings The results demonstrate that ESG is an emerging domain in the field of sustainable finance as the number of publications and total citations are showing an upward trend. The top two journals in terms of productivity are the Journal of Sustainable Finance and Investment and Business Strategy and the Environment. The highest number of publications are from the United States and George Serafeim is the most influential author in the ESG domain. Further, the result of cluster analysis of bibliographic coupling reveals four intellectual themes, (1) ESG investing; (2) ESG disclosures and Integrated Reporting; (3) ESG performance and firm value and (4) Corporate Governance and ESG performance. The content analysis of the 190 high-quality journal articles presents the current 11 areas of research in ESG. The impact of ESG on firm value and ESG investment are the prominent themes, and the effect of ESG on the cost of capital and ESG audit and assurance are the emerging themes in this domain.Research limitations/implications The keyword search is solely focusing on the theme of the study. Further, other keywords such as Corporate Social Responsibility and Corporate sustainability taken along with ESG may provide distinct results.Practical implications The study advances the understanding of the ESG domain by developing new possibilities to discover key research areas.Originality/value The present work provides a comprehensive and detailed bibliometric and content analysis of ESG literature. This study delineates the thorough literature review of journal articles published in the recent five years in high-rated journals.