SUSTAINABILITY, ESG, AND ACCOUNTING: A BIBLIOMETRIC REVIEW OF THE FINANCIAL REPORTING LITERATURE

Abstract

Over the past five years, environmental, social, and governance (ESG) considerations have moved from the periphery to the centre of corporate financial reporting, generating a rapidly expanding and increasingly fragmented body of scholarship. This study applies bibliometric and science-mapping techniques to map the intellectual and conceptual structure of the literature situated at the intersection of sustainability, ESG, and accounting. Drawing on a corpus of 1,000 open-access journal articles indexed in The Lens and published between 2020 and 2025, the analysis combines performance analysis (productivity and citation metrics) with science mapping (co-authorship, keyword co-occurrence, and source coupling generated in VOSviewer). The corpus accumulated 18,337 citations (mean = 18.34 per document; corpus h-index = 64) and grew at a compound annual rate of roughly 44% between 2020 and 2024. Sustainability, PLoS ONE, and Heliyon emerged as the most productive outlets, while the most influential documents concentrated on the ESG–financial-performance relationship. Keyword co-occurrence analysis revealed a thematic core organised around ESG, sustainability, corporate governance, financial performance, and sustainable development. The review identifies the dominant research fronts, the leading contributors, and the methodological orientation of the field, and outlines an agenda for future inquiry into sustainability accounting and disclosure. The findings offer researchers, practitioners, and standard-setters a structured overview of a fast-moving and policy-relevant field.