A bibliometric analysis of research on corporate sustainability: Reflection from the past two decades

The changing attitude of corporates towards society and the environment leads to a new industrial revolution in the 21st century, reshaping the business strategy. During the last two decades, the stakeholders' expectations of corporate enterprises have radically changed. Consequently, corporate enterprises have started to change their business strategy from short-term myopic goals of profit-maximization to long-term sustainability goals taking care of three pillars: people, planet, and profit. The changing attitude of corporates has attracted the attention of researchers around the globe to study corporate sustainability from different dimensions. The present study is a modest attempt to present a thorough bibliographic analysis that provides the current and emerging research issues of corporate sustainability (CS). We used VOSviewer Software to generate, visualize and analyze the bibliometric network of publications in the Web of Science Core Collection Database for 2001-2021. The study's findings indicate that maximum contribution comes from highly impactful journals, such as Corporate Social Responsibility and Environmental Management, Journal of Business Ethics and Business Strategy and The Environment. Country-wise analysis indicates that the developed countries have substantially contributed to the literature. The leading countries are Australia, Canada, the UK, the USA, China, France, and Germany. The citation analysis depicts that the articles published in the Journal of Business Ethics, Corporate Social Responsibility and Environmental Management, and Ecological Economics have received maximum citations in the last ten years. The findings also indicate that the assessment of CS, disclosure of CS, and the association between CS performance and firm performance have been the leading research issues during the last two decades. However, the linkage between corporate sustainability and sustainable development goals is a recent prosperous research topic. Finally, based on the findings, the study highlights future research directions in corporate sustainability.