Toward a Sustainable Future: A Comprehensive Review and Future Directions in Sustainability Reporting Research

This study aims to review the extent of sustainability reporting (SR) research focusing on corporate disclosures. This study presents the evolution of SR research, describes the current state, and suggests potential directions for future research. For this research, we retrieved data from the Scopus Database, following the systematic literature review data retrieval protocol. Our search has yielded a total of 1206 eligible research documents. The retrieved metadata of relevant papers were analyzed using various bibliometric techniques such as performance analysis, structured network analysis, and thematic categories. The findings of this study reveal that there has been an increasing trend of publications with an annual growth rate of 28% in this domain. Our study constructed the conceptual and intellectual structure of SR research and described the past and present of this research base. In addition, our study portrays the various thematic categories of SR literature. The present study is an early effort to systematically evaluate SR research and has several implications for the theory, society, and policymakers. Firstly, stakeholders and the community can gain insights into organizational initiatives toward climate change, governance, and ethics. Secondly, Policymakers can analyze how and to what extent organizations are incorporating the guidelines into their strategic decisions and can focus on the further scope of the improvement in the policy formation.