The phenomenal rise of Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) as a research issue: A bibliometric analysis

During the first stage, the following keywords were used to search in Scopus: “ESG”; “Environment*” OR “Social” OR “Governance” OR “Corporate Governance”; and “invest*” OR “scor*” OR “index” OR “rating provider*” OR “rate provider*” OR “sustainability” OR “sustainable.” Further, the article title, abstract, and author keywords were used as strings for document search.

A total of 1,110 documents were extracted using the above search keywords for the period from 2001 to the data retrieval date (September 29, 2021). Although almost 50% of the documents belonged to the business, economic, or financial fields as specified by Scopus, there were also publications from other research areas such as physics and astronomy, toxicology and pharmaceutics, material science, biochemistry, pharmacology, medicine, genetics and molecular biology, and chemistry.