The focus and frontier of corporate social responsibility

Purpose - This paper aims to help scholars know about the focus and frontier in the field of corporate social responsibility (CSR). Although related research in CSR started 60 years ago, there is not much systematical literature review on CSR in recent years. This paper applies scientometric method, especially co-word analysis, to explore the frontier and focus of CSR in the twenty-first century, based on the articles from 2001 to 2014 in SSCI database. Design/methodology/approach - In this paper, the authors first use the scientometric method and co-word analysis for keywords filtering and apply social network methodology to investigate the networks of high-frequency keywords and high-frequency authors. Findings - The authors summarize the current state of CSR research in two aspects. By co-word analysis of high-frequency keywords, the findings show that the focus and frontier are highly related to CSR. Based on the findings of social network analysis, this paper concludes four important research directions and possible future research of CSR. Originality/value - The findings in this paper will help scholars of CSR or other related fields to realize the focus and frontier of CSR and provide some guidance for their future research.