TY - JOUR
T1 - The development of research on environmental, social, and governance (ESG)
T2 - A bibliometric analysis
AU - Senadheera, Sachini Supunsala
AU - Gregory, Richard
AU - Rinklebe, Jörg
AU - Farrukh, Muhammad
AU - Rhee, Jay Hyuk
AU - Ok, Yong Sik
N1 - Funding Information:
This study was supported by the Korea University Business School Research Grant and the International ESG Association, Seoul, Korea.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 The Author(s). This open access article is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) 4.0 license.
PY - 2022
Y1 - 2022
N2 - Investment in environmental, social, and governance (ESG) significantly influences a company’s financial aspects that drive sustainability. This study sample covers the data of 981 articles obtained from the Scopus database spanning over 141 journals from 2001 to 2021 and uses quantitative bibliometric analysis to discover present and future research directions of ESG. This analysis evaluates prolific research elements, such as authors, citations, journals, institutions, countries, regions, possible links between ESG and corporate performance and trends while focusing on the environmental pillar. With the emergence of the term ESG in 2006, the number of publications on this topic has almost doubled every year since 2017. With this exponential increase in the number of publications, the world is expected to give greater consideration to the concept of ESG, including green investing, circular economy, and RE100. This study highlights the key findings during the past decade including the importance of and tendency for ESG investing and revealing the less well-specified metrics of the governance pillar compared to those of the environmental and social pillars.
AB - Investment in environmental, social, and governance (ESG) significantly influences a company’s financial aspects that drive sustainability. This study sample covers the data of 981 articles obtained from the Scopus database spanning over 141 journals from 2001 to 2021 and uses quantitative bibliometric analysis to discover present and future research directions of ESG. This analysis evaluates prolific research elements, such as authors, citations, journals, institutions, countries, regions, possible links between ESG and corporate performance and trends while focusing on the environmental pillar. With the emergence of the term ESG in 2006, the number of publications on this topic has almost doubled every year since 2017. With this exponential increase in the number of publications, the world is expected to give greater consideration to the concept of ESG, including green investing, circular economy, and RE100. This study highlights the key findings during the past decade including the importance of and tendency for ESG investing and revealing the less well-specified metrics of the governance pillar compared to those of the environmental and social pillars.
KW - ESG
KW - bibliometric analysis
KW - environmental, social, and governance
KW - responsible investment
KW - sustainable future
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85139097070&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1080/27658511.2022.2125869
DO - 10.1080/27658511.2022.2125869
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85139097070
SN - 2765-8511
VL - 8
JO - Sustainable Environment
JF - Sustainable Environment
IS - 1
M1 - 2125869
ER -
