Bibliometric study on environmental, social, and governance research using CiteSpace

This paper offers an overview of the status of and emerging trends in environmental, social, and governance (ESG) research through a bibliometric approach using CiteSpace. In particular, our study aimed to elucidate the overall intellectual structure of the environmental, social, and governance academic field. To this end, we performed a topic search related to the environmental, social, and governance field and gathered published articles (2007–2021) from the Web of Science. Subsequently, we identified productive authors, institutes, and countries/regions to determine main research forces in the environmental, social, and governance field. Additionally, we conducted a co-citation analysis to identify highly cited authors, journals, and literatures in the environmental, social, and governance field. Furthermore, we performed a literature-co-citation-based cluster analysis and literature citation burst analysis to confirm the main themes and hotspots of the environmental, social, and governance field. These analyses can contribute to the investigations of key contributing forces in the environmental, social, and governance field at the author, institution, country/region, and journal levels and provide insights into the knowledge structures and orientations of the environmental, social, and governance field for future research.