Environmental, Social And Governance Research – Current State And Future Directions

Abstract

The increasing global emphasis on sustainable development has led to the adoption of Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) factors into business practises which has also drawn the attention of the academicians. This study reviews and summarizes a corpus data of 3,225 documents on ESG literature with special focus on ESG investing, published during 1991 to 2025, retrieved from Scopus database, with the help of bibliometric analysis. The analysis was performed using VOS Viewer and the Biblioshiny package by R software, which provides a graphical representation of the data. It provides a comprehensive overview of current state of ESG literature by emphasizing on the emerging areas and trends in publications, most occurring keywords, prominent authors, citation and co-citation analysis, co-authorship analysis. The limitation of using only a single database for collecting and analysing the data is acknowledged which also adds up for the future research. This study enhances the review quality by pointing the researchers towards the future research directions in the area of ESG.