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A Bibliometric Analysis of Corporate Social Responsibility in Sustainable

Development

Nan Ye, Tung-Boon Kueh, Lisong Hou, Yongxin Liu, Hang Yu

PII: S0959-6526(20)32726-8
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2020.122679
Reference: JCLP 122679

To appear in: Journal of Cleaner Production

Received Date: 14 January 2020

Revised Date: 22 May 2020
Accepted Date: 5 June 2020

Please cite this article as: Ye N, Kueh T-B, Hou L, Liu Y, Yu H, A Bibliometric Analysis of Corporate
Social Responsibility in Sustainable Development, Journal of Cleaner Production, https://
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Title

A Bibliometric Analysis of Corporate Social Responsibility in

Sustainable Development

Author Information

Nan Ye*, Tung-Boon Kueh**, Lisong Hou, Yongxin Liu, Hang Yu

Business School, Jiangsu Normal University, No. 101 Shanghai Road, Xuzhou,
Jiangsu, 221116, China

1. Nan YE, Ph.D., Associate professor, Department of Marketing, Business School,

Jiangsu Normal University, Email: nye@jsnu.edu.cn
2. Tung-Boon KUEH, Graduate student, International School, Jiangsu Normal
University, Email: seath87@yahoo.com
3. Lisong HOU, Ph.D., Professor, Department of Marketing, Business School,
Jiangsu Normal University, Email: abc@jsnu.edu.cn
4. Yongxin LIU, Ph.D., Associate professor, Department of Marketing, Business
School, Jiangsu Normal University Email: lyx151@126.com
5. Hang YU, Graduate student, Business School, Jiangsu Normal University Email:
1872567@qq.com

Corresponding author

* Corresponding author 1. E-mail address: nye@jsnu.edu.cn

**
Corresponding author 2. E-mail address: seath87@yahoo.com
Word count: 7703

A Bibliometric Analysis of Corporate Social

Responsibility in Sustainable Development
Nan Ye*, Tung-Boon Kueh**, Lisong Hou, Yongxin Liu, Hang Yu
Business School, Jiangsu Normal University, No. 101 Shanghai Road, Xuzhou,
Jiangsu, 221116, China

Abstract

The involvement of corporate social responsibility (CSR) in sustainable development

(SD) is becoming a popular topic on research and business domain. However, the
co-themed research is still rather new and hasn't been fully studied. An in-depth
bibliometric analysis using the ‘CiteSpace’ software is applied to analyze and
visualize the knowledge map of the CSR research related to SD. Main findings show
that the CSR involvement in SD is a lasting but recent prosperous research topic. The
top 3 influential journals in this area are Corporate Social Responsibility and
Environment Management; Sustainability; and Journal of Cleaner Production. Porter
ME, Carroll AB, etc., are the most impactful authors. The co-author network is
fragmented, while cross-national co-operations occur in groups. 11 clusters are
identified to be highly concerned, among which, “stakeholder” and “NGO” are long
lasting till now. 13 burst terms has changed over 15 years (2005-2019) indicated the
research frontiers evolution in this field, with the earliest “sustainability” to “strategy”,
“performance” and then “stakeholder”, “developing country”, “disclosure” and
“supply chain management”, etc., and “climate change” being the newest but
strongest. Four stages of the evolution can be identified: initial phase (1997-2004),
debating phase (2005-2009), rapid developing phase (2010-2013), and research
specialization phase (2014-2019). Finally, contributions, limitations and further
research directions are discussed.
Keywords: Corporate Social Responsibility; Sustainable Development; Knowledge
map; Bibliometric analysis; CiteSpace
1. Introduction

With the growing consensus in society on the degrading environment that is

gradually coming into public slight, such as climate change, resource scarcity, etc.,
sustainable development (SD), which was first defined as a “development that meets
the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to
meet their own needs” (WCED, 1987, p. 8), is currently becoming one of the hot
topics on solving those environmental and social-economical problems. The United
Nation (UN) introduced Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2015 with the aim
to provide an evidence-based framework of SD planning and implementation,
consisting of 17 goals and 169 targets, which explicitly highlighted the role of private
businesses in achieving these goals with their creativity and innovation (United Nations,
2015), which generally takes in the form of corporate social responsibility (CSR).
Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is an effective strategy that conceived
broadly as a firm’s or brand’s commitment to maximize long-term economic, societal,
and environmental well-being through business practices, policies, and resources (Du
et al., 2011). CSR has transformed from philanthropic attribute to obligatory and
compulsory over decades (Carroll, 2008) and becomes a successful business model
that provides comparative advantage in many aspects (Porter and Kramer, 2006) and
promotes corporate contributions to SD (Behringer and Szegedi, 2016; de Camargo et
al., 2019; de Sousa Jabbour et al., 2020). CSR has various definitions (Dahlsrud,
2008), but when it refers to SD, the essence of CSR is founded on three dimensions:
economic, social, and environmental (Zhang et al., 2019), which was just consistent
with the Triple Bottom Line of SD (Elkington, 1998).
As seen from above, the ideology of CSR and SD in long-term and the balance
between the economic, societal, and environmental elements do overlap. However,
SD and CSR are quitely different in their main focuses. Behringer and Szegedi (2016)
argued that SD focuses more on meeting needs; ethical values; social, economic and
environmental dimensions; human rights; and cooperation, while CSR focuses on
environmental and social interrelationships; stakeholder approach; ethical behavior;
and volunteering. Similarly, Dyllick and Muff (2016) argued that SD focuses on
worldwide challenges and achievement of the SDGs on a macro level, while CSR
focuses exclusively on business-level win-win strategies and eco-efficiency at the
micro level. Ebner and Baumgartner (2006) also recommend these two terms should
be used in their original semantic sense.
In recent years, the interaction between CSR and SD has been strengthened in
both theoretical and practical level (Behringer and Szegedi, 2016). Based on our
literature review, there is a rising trend in academic field focusing on how corporate
has contributed to SD (Moon, 2007; Heikkurinen and Bonnedahl, 2013; Behringer
and Szegedi, 2016; Engert et al., 2016; van der Waal and Thijssens, 2020; Prashar and
Sunder, 2020). What’s more, corporate sustainability (CS) is considered to be the
company version of SD (Steurer et al., 2005), and it is said can be used as the
synonyms of corporate responsibility in the United Nations Global Compact 2013
(Behringer & Szegedi, 2016).
The research fields of CSR and/or SD have been growing for more than 30 years
respectively (Fatma and Rahman, 2015; Malik, 2015; Zhu and Hua, 2016), however
the inclusion of both topics are comparatively fewer and newer. Due to certain parts
of CSR lexicon related to the sustainability of either corporation, environment or
society, which is similar to corporate’s SD, the concept of CSR and its relationship to
SD is easily misunderstood (Moon, 2007). Some papers even used SD and CSR
vaguely and even interchangeably (Ebner & Baumgartner, 2006). There is still some
debates on the relationship between the two (Behringer & Szegedi, 2016). Given the
important role of CSR to achieve SD, we want to get an overall knowledge about the
contribution of CSR to SD shown in academic field. Specifically, we are wondering
that to what extent is CSR related to SD and has the relationship between CSR and
SD evolved over time? Additionally, how is the knowledge structure shaped between
them? What are the hotspots and how did they evolve over time?
To the best of our knowledge, there is no evidence of systematic reviews cover
these questions. Many scholars have reviewed existing literature to address various
important aspects of CSR and SD. For example, in relating to CSR topics, there is
research on small and medium enterprise (Bikefe et al., 2020); employee-centred CSR
(Low and Siegel, 2019); corporate sustainability (Baumgartner, 2014); strategic
management (Engert et al., 2016); state of the art in construction industry (Xia et al.,
2018) and mining industry (Rodrigues and Mendes, 2018); supply chain management
(Feng et al., 2017); and value creation for stakeholder (Peloza and Shang, 2011) are
well discussed. In addition, reviews of the SD literature have focused on specific
disciplines, such as management sciences (Zemigala, 2019) and sustainability science
(Bettencourt and Kaur, 2011); and on topics like sustainable development goals
implementation (Allen et al., 2018) and sustainable manufacturing (Bhatt et al., 2020).
Yet, all these review studies are scoped to investigate either profiled thematic
dimensions of CSR in SD or limited to SD. Only a few works are found to be
explorations of the linkage between SD and CSR, but either based on a content
analysis of the main milestones of SD process (Behringer & Szegedi, 2016); or with a
regional context focus (Zhou et al., 2012), or an international business focus (Kolk
and Van Tulder, 2010; Kolk, 2016).
In order to address the critical research gap and figure out the above research
questions, an in-depth analysis with bibliometric method of accumulated studies
available related to CSR in SD (we marked as CSR/SD) was applied. Research using
bibliometric analysis specifically to review articles related to SD or CSR remains
scarce and separately (Hassan, 2014; Zhu and Hua, 2016; Olawumi and Chan; 2018;
Zemigala, 2019; van der Waal and Thijssens, 2020). This article is the first to conduct
a bibliometric study on CSR and SD simultaneously, which is expected to deliver a
holistic picture of this domain through the exploring of the evolution of hot spots in
the field. To achieve the aim of the study, the CiteSpace software is used for
visualizing and analyzing trends and patterns in scientific literature based on ISI Web
of Science Social Science Citation Index (WoS/SSCI). With this, it enables the
discovery of the critical points in the development of CSR/SD domain while
understanding and interpreting the network and historical patterns.
The rest of this article is organized as follows: first, we further elaborate the
details of data collected and software used in the methodology section. Then, a
statistical analysis of data will be presented together with the co-author and
co-country network analysis. This is followed by the co-citation analysis, hotspot
analysis and the evolution trend analysis. Finally, we conclude main findings with the
outlining on the limitations of current study and future research recommendations.

2. Methodology

2.1 Source of data

Source of data used in this study is extracted from WoS/SSCI with the search
terms of “sustainable development” AND “corporate social responsibility” under the
topic category. WoS database is chosen for its wide coverage of excellent publications
on overall academic fields and being one of the largest repositories range from 1900
to nowadays. This database also include all bibliographic information about their
authors, citations, journals and more that can be used in the analysis. As CSR/SD is
considered as social science related topic, thus SSCI database is selected.
The criteria used in the searching process is essential as they can influence the
result significantly. From the previous bibilometrics paper, Kajikawa et al. (2007)
used [“sustainab*”] as a query to include the similar phase (“sustainable” and
“sustainability”) in WoS database but resulted in highly polluted sample. Similar
situation occurs when using popular search term in CSR topic, such as [“Social
Responsibility”] and [“CSR”] which include content related medical, nursing and
social science. To ensure the data collected is low contaminated (Zhu and Hua, 2016;
Zemigala, 2019) and precisely reflect the academic field of CSR/SD, we limited our
search to [“Corporate Social Responsibility”] and [“Sustainable Development”], as
these two phases are central to the discussion of this paper. The field of search are
limited to “topic” (which include searching in “title”, “abstract” and “keyword”)
without any chronological filter in order to include all papers with is related to both
search phrases. However, only scientific articles written in English were considered.
We limited the data to scientific articles only while excluding book reviews, meeting,
editorial, books which are not focus in this study. Other articles appeared in
commercial magazines and conferences are also eliminated due to lesser
acknowledgement in scientific contribution. After selection of raw data, dataset of
1006 article with a time span of 1997-2019 are collected for analysis (Collected on 4
August 2019).

2.2 Analytical tool

CiteSpace, the analytical tool used in this study, is a Java application for
visualizing and analyzing trends and patterns in scientific literature developed by
Chaomei Chen from Drexel University (Chen et al., 2010). The software is chosen for
its capable of analyzing the potential knowledge structure contained in the literature
through integrating network visualization, spectral clustering and automatic cluster
labelling for further analysis in this study (Chen, 2006). It consists of a variety of
visual analytic functions that boost the interpretability of the visualized knowledge
domain. But most importantly, it can be used to identify intellectual basis, hotspots,
emerging trends and knowledge network of various papers in a similar academic field.
Beside this, this software can analyze the network from different aspects of the
collected data, such as authors, institutions, countries, keywords, categories, cited
authors, cited references and cited journals. It can also translate the WoS textual data
that can be downloaded directly through WoS website into executable format, thus
shorten the data processing time significantly. Software version of CiteSpace used is
V5.3.R4.
The advantages of this bibliometric technique are as follows: Firstly, the findings
will be based on quantitative statistical analysis and reliable dataset which generally
consists large quantity of peer reviewed publications that can cover most regions and
disciplines (Zemigala, 2019). Secondly, the visualizing network analysis in this
method can be used to classify scope and structure of the discipline by discovering the
influential authors or papers and main clusters of current research. These finding are
essential in determining the hotspots and evolution of the study field while providing
insights to emerging research areas (Fahimnia et al., 2015). Thirdly, this research
method is also more suitable for academic field with enormous numbers of
publications than qualitative analysis, especially in the study of exploring the internal
relationship of the literature (Zhao et al., 2018).

3. Research Overview

3.1 Number of Publications by Year

To analyze the development trend of this academic field, the number of

publications over years in CSR/SD domain is summarized and shown in Figure 1.
According to the data collected, it is observed that the first article in this field was
published in 1997, and it is not until 2007 that the number of publications show a
significant increasing trend. The rising trend also indicates such topics are getting
attention from the academic field currently and for the upcoming years. Besides this,
90% of the articles (911 out of 1006 articles) were published within this decade and
61% of the total articles (617 out of 1006 articles) were published in the last 5 years
(2014- 2019). This indicates the novelty of the research concerning CSR/SD. The
number of publications on 2019 is 122 which is significant less than the previous year.
The reason behind this is the data collection date of this paper is on 4 August 2019
thus the later publications that should be categorize in year 2019 are not included in
this dataset.
 194

122
110
99
92
85
65
55
48
37 41
21
8 14
1 1 1 2 2 4 1 3

Figure 1 Number of Publications over Years

3.2 Source of Publication

This section describes the distribution of publications from different journals.

Table 1 shows the top 10 journals that have published articles in the field of CSR/SD.
It is found that 1006 articles related to the topic were published in 246 journals. The
most productive journal is found to be “Corporate Social Responsibility and
Environment Management” which published 11.53% of articles of the collected
sample, followed by “Sustainability” (11.03%), “Journal of Cleaner Production”
(8.85%), “Journal of Business Ethics” (7.56%) and “Business Strategy and the
Environment” (7.26%). These are expected as the top journals and are also high
ranking publishers in the CSR/SD field.

Table 1 Top 10 journals of CSR/SD

Impact Factor
Journal Name Number of articles %
2019
Corporate Social Responsibility and
116 11.53 5.513
Environment Management
Sustainability 111 11.03 2.592
Journal of Cleaner Production 89 8.85 6.395
Journal of Business Ethics 76 7.56 3.796
Business Strategy and the Environment 73 7.26 6.381
Sustainable Development 42 4.18 3.821
Resources Policy 21 2.09 3.185
Amfiteatru Economic 19 1.89 1.238
Management Decision 16 1.6 1.963
The Extractive Industries and Society 10 0.99 2.064
3.3 Author and co-authorship analysis

In order to visualize the corporation network between authors, the CiteSpace

software is execute with the collected dataset with time span of 1997-2019 and 1 year
per slice. “Author” is selected as the node type while select top 50 of most cited item
in each slice. CiteSpace is then run to obtain Figure 2 that shows the author
collaboration network. The size of author name and node indicating the number of
publication by authors and the collaboration strength is shown by the thickness of the
link between them. The author network, with 92 nodes and 48 links, means among the
92 authors with top published papers, only 48 co-authored relationships have been
found. This loosely connected network with network density of 0.0115, as shown in
Figure 2, indicates that most of the research are done independently with significantly
less or no long term, high intensity co-operations between them.
According to the analysis of CSR/SD related articles during 1997-2019, author
with more than 5 publications are Garcia-Sanchez I.M. (14 articles), Munoz-Torres
M.J. (10 articles), Galledo-Alvarez I. (7 articles), Kemp D. (7 articles), Rivera-Lirio
J.M. (7 articles), Steurer R. (7 articles), Amran A. (6 articles), Fernandez-Izquierdo
M.A. (6 articles), Idemudia U. (6 articles). Among all authors with weak or
non-collaborations in their research, this three authors: Garcia-Sanchez I.M.,
Galindo-Alvarez I. and Amor-Esteban V. form a strong connection network in their
research publications. The co-authored articles of this three author are found related to
application of newly proposed CSR practice index that convert known CSR related
information into measurable indicator on CSR performance and degree of CSR
commitment. Besides this, there are also some articles from their collaboration focus
on mimetic force on company CSR development that published in recent years.
 Figure 2 Author collaboration network analysis

3.4 Affiliation analysis

Table 2 presents the organization distribution of the 1006 CSR/SD articles in this
bibliometic analysis. It shows that Bucharest University of Economic Studies in
Romania contributes the most with 20 articles, followed by University of Salamanca
and Universitat Jaume I from Spain with 17 and 15 papers respectively. Along with
other institutions that can be observed in Table 2, it is found that 4 out of top 10
institutions are located in Spain which contribute more than 40% of article outputs.
This may imply the high focus of CSR in SD topic in this country and those
universities.

Table 2 Top 10 organizations with largest number of publications

Organization Country Number of article
Bucharest University of Economic Studies Romania 20
University of Salamanca Spain 17
Universitat Jaume I Spain 15
University of South Australia Australia 15
The University of Queensland Australia 14
University of Granada Spain 13
University of London UK 13
University of Zaragoza Spain 12
York University Canada 11
University of Groningen Netherlands 10
3.5 Country/Region analysis

The top 10 countries/regions of publications in this field are listed in Table 3.

Surprisingly, Spain and England have the highest similar number of publications of
135 and 133 that covers 26.6% of total dataset collected. Then followed by USA
(115), China (94) and Australia (83) which cover 29% of total publications in the
dataset. The analysis also shows the European countries contribute more than 70%
(722 out of 1006) of the CSR/SD publications which reveal the frontier position of
Europe’s academic field in this topic.
It is also observed that most of the countries on the list are almost the highly
economically developed countries. This may be due to the active business operations,
the cultural background and the high density of academic institutions (Zemigala,
2015). Further investigation on those with 5 or more publications revealed that out of
38 countries, 30 of them belong to the developed countries. While other developing
countries on the list, such as China, Brazil, India, Malaysia, Thailand, Mexico,
Pakistan and Turkey, are the most rapid developing countries.
To further understand the collaboration pattern between the countries, CiteSpace
is run in the similar setting with the node type changed to “Country” in this case.
Figure 3 is generated to show the collaboration network between the countries. The
network has 46 nodes, 119 links and density of 0.0415. The result, however, suggests
that strong co-operation occurs in groups. China, England and Netherlands form a
close cluster between them which implies more cross-national authorships occur
between them. On the other hand, Australia and USA appear to be the second largest
cluster. Spain, surprisingly, have lesser association in the publication with other
country. Even though statically Spain published the most articles in CSR/SD field.
Table 3 Top 10 countries/regions with most publications in CSR/SD
Country/Region Number of articles %
Spain 135 13.42
England 133 13.22
USA 115 11.43
Peoples R China 94 9.34
Australia 83 8.25
Canada 59 5.87
Netherlands 47 4.67
Germany 45 4.47
France 43 4.27
Taiwan 41 4.08
 Figure 3 Country collaboration network analysis

4. Co-citation analysis

The frequency of citations on specific author and article can be used to measure
whether the publication and research is influential on the literature. This can be found
by utilizing the CiteSpace software with similar method, however in this case, the
node type changed to “Cited Author” to examine the co-citation relation in the dataset.
Top 10 cited authors are listed into Table 4 and the visualized clustered relationship is
shown in Figure 4. Porter ME has the highest cited number at 277 times among all
publications in the CSR/SD field. This is then followed by Carroll AB at cited
frequency of 222 and other authors that show great contributions in CSR/SD research
domain. Figure 4 gives a clearer view of the core keywords for each cluster while
pointing out the highly cited authors in each sub topics of the CSR/SD domain. This
shows Porter’s article is one of the core cited papers in the management practice and
value creating cluster, while Carroll and Freeman demonstrate their pivotal roles in
the corporate responsibility cluster development.
 Table 4 Top 10 authors and articles cited in CSR/SD
Cited No. of
Author Article
Frequency citations
PORTER ME 277 PORTER ME, 2011 56
CARROLL AB 222 CARROLL AB, 2010 49
FREEMAN RE 191 DAHLSRUD A, 2008 45
HART SL 185 AGUINIS H, 2012 41
ELKINGTON J 178 SEURING S, 2008 36
MCWILLIAMS A 174 PORTER ME, 2006 34
KOLK A 148 MATTEN D, 2008 30
BANSAL P 139 BANSAL P, 2005 25
ORLITZKY M 136 SCHERER AG, 2011 25
WADDOCK SA 106 CARTER CR, 2008 22

Figure 4 Cited author co-citation clustered analysis, Nodes=359, Links=1084

With similar operating method for CiteSpace software but manipulating the node
type to “Reference”, the highest number of citations of particular articles are
generated. As indicated in Table 4, Porter’s papers are highly influential in the
CSR/SD research domain. If compared to the dataset that contains 1006 articles, 56
citations or 5.6% of studies cited the particular article, which demonstrated the
remarkable contribution in the specific field. Michael E. Porter (aka. PORTER ME),
who is well known for his Porter’s five force model that identified competitive
advantage forces over the industry, further explains how the corporate CSR initiative
can lead to sustainable competitive edge. Both of his publications that listed in Table
4, “Competitive advantage of nations: creating and sustaining superior performance”
(Porter and Kramer, 2011) and “The link between competitive advantage and
corporate social responsibility” (Porter and Kramer, 2006), are well known in the
CSR/SD area and are highly cited.
On the other hand, Carroll AB, who is also famous on his proposal of CSR
pyramid and how CSR affects firm’s performance, reviewed the underlying factors
that support the acceptance and application of CSR cause in the business community
perspective. The concept of this review paper is highly related to the sustainable
development of a company through the CSR initiative which is one of the main
themes in this academic field (Carroll and Shabana, 2010). Other top authors’ papers
such as focus on definition of CSR (Dahlsrud, 2008); review CSR literature and
theoretical framework (Aguinis and Glavas, 2012); sustainable supply chain
management article review and conceptual framework (Seuring and Müller, 2008),
are all highly cited in different topics in this CSR/SD academic domain.

5. Hotspot analysis

Keywords in an article reflect the significant content of the study within several
words. Thus, the co-occurrence and intensity analysis of keywords of a research field
enable the identification of the research hot spots and frontiers (Chen et al., 2016). For
the purpose of analyzing highly used keywords and its network map, CiteSpace
software executed with the node type changed to “Keyword”. As the search terms for
data collection are “sustainable development” and “corporate social responsibility”,
this two terms are hidden in the visualization along with “social responsibility” and
“csr” which have the similar meanings in order to minimize the effect of search term
and the knowledge map. Figure 5 shows performance and management is highly
concerned in current research study; while impact, strategy, perspective are getting
attention from the researchers too. This network has 199 nodes, 780 links with
network density of 0.0162, suggesting that there are various while not very close
connections between these keywords.
 Figure 5 Co-occurrence analysis of keywords, Nodes=199, Links=780

The keywords in the dataset are further arranged according to the frequency and
centrality and listed the top 10 of both cases in Table 5. Centrality is a measurement
of the influence of a node in a network where keywords and themes that have high
betweenness centrality value indicate the greater influence in the development of
CSR/SD research field and the importance of such keywords in connecting several
other research topics. Table 5 shows significant difference in raking based on
frequency and centrality, where the keyword “performance” and “management”
showed highest frequency among all others at 211 and 189 respectively. This is then
followed by keywords “strategy” (118), financial performance” (114), “perspective”
(112) and “business” (101). On the other hand, the keyword “company” shows
highest centrality value at 0.38. Other key phrases such as “firm performance”,
“green”, “impact”, “competitive advantage”, “innovation”, “responsibility”,
“management”, “firm” and “decision making” at betweenness centrality scores range
from 0.27 to 0.15. These results represent the widely discussed terms and their active
role in the linkage to distinct aspects and concepts in the research field. Keywords
with similar meanings in Table 5 such as “performance”, “firm performance”, and
“financial performance” also demonstrate that the issue related to “performance” is
more highly concerned than other issues in this dataset.
 Table 5 Top 10 keywords according to frequency and centrality
Keyword Frequency Keyword Centrality
performance 211 company 0.38
management 189 firm performance 0.27
strategy 118 green 0.23
financial performance 114 impact 0.22
perspective 112 competitive advantage 0.21
business 101 innovation 0.2
impact 98 responsibility 0.19
governance 94 management 0.18
framework 88 firm 0.17
company 86 decision making 0.15

Based on Figure 5 and co-occurrence of keywords analyzed, CiteSpace enabled

further interpretation of the information into clusters by using Log-likelihood ratio
(LLR) clustering algorithm. This is then formed the Figure 6 that shows the 11
clusters found and Table 6 gives further details of these clusters. Silhouette value,
between 0 and 1, is generally used to measure the internal homogeneity of clusters or
how similar an object is to its own cluster compared to other clusters. The higher of
such value shows more effective clustering is formed and the object is well matched
within its own cluster. Clustering of keywords in Figure 6 with modularity, Q of
0.7093 and mean silhouette of 0.57 indicate the result of clustering is appropriate to
use in analyzing. As found, different clusters indicate different aspects of
sustainability issues and concerns over the CSR operations. This 11 clusters found
represent the major concerns of CSR integration into SD.
As shown in Table 6, the high internal homogeneity (silhouette) values between
0.68-0.95 can signify that top terms within the cluster are well matched and the
clustering is reliable. Cluster 0 focus on the stakeholder benefits where the study
revolves around stakeholder engagement, decision-making, stakeholder reactions,
social sustainability and SMEs. Cluster 1 relates to the CSR reporting where the study
contains global reporting initiative, environmental performance indicators, corporate
social responsibility voluntary reporting, voluntary disclosure and stakeholder
influence. The main theme of cluster 2 is the performance related study in CSR/SD
field which includes data envelopment analysis, sustainable supply chain management,
dynamic capability, organizational performance and investment. Cluster 3 associates
with managing the external influence of media, investor or consumer and the study
links with communication, critical perspectives, ethical labelling, human rights and
media. Cluster 4 relates to the sustainability issue locally especially in the mining
region. Cluster 5 demonstrates the panel modelling part of the discipline. Cluster 6
shows research orientation in social concern of various issues on sustainable
development. The other detailed information for smaller clusters is listed in Table 6.

Figure 6 Cluster analysis of keywords

Table 6 The details of keywords in clusters

Cluster ID Silhouette Top Term in LLR Main Theme
stakeholder engagement, decision-making, stakeholder
0 0.71 Stakeholder
reactions, SMEs.
global reporting initiative, environmental performance
1 0.83 indicators, corporate social responsibility voluntary CSR reporting
reporting, voluntary disclosure
data envelopment analysis, sustainable supply chain
2 0.83 management, dynamic capability, organizational Performance
performance.
communication, critical perspectives, ethical labelling,
3 0.68 External
human rights
mining, impact assessment, local government, Local
4 0.79
sustainability assurance, regional and local development Sustainability
panel, corporate, social, empirical, information
5 0.80 Modelling
technology
decision analysis, social impact assessment, cultural
6 0.88 difference, sustainable development, punctuated Society
equilibrium
7 0.92 regulation, market, game, ecolabel, theory Market
online disclosure of information, China, network
8 0.89 Online
governance
9 0.84 academe, institutionalization, NGO NGO
10 0.95 bottom-up analysis, critical, development Development
 To further inspect the temporal patterns of how the clusters of keywords evolved
over time, information on frequent repeating terms and clusters is transform into a
timeline view and this is shown in Figure 7. In timeline visualizations, clusters are
displayed horizontally along timelines and the label of each cluster is shown at the
end of the cluster’s timeline. The legend above the display area marks every 5 years
and in each year only the top 3 highest count keywords are shown along each of the
timelines. The color of the links between keywords represent the time slice of the first
co- occurrence.

Figure 7 Timeline view of popular keywords in different clusters

For example, the cluster #0 or the cluster related to stakeholder started on 2005
and lasted until 2019. In this cluster, keywords that have been used frequently
includes “perspective”, “firm”, “impact”, “business”, “profitability”, “policy”,
“stakeholder engagement”, “assurance”, “service”, “environment policy”,
“perception”, “trust”, “SMEs” and “social sustainability”. Only 2 clusters are still
visibly active on year 2019 and they are stakeholder and NGO related cluster. Other
than these, cluster #6 which is classified as social related theme has the earliest
emerging higher frequency keyword “sustainability”.

6. Evolution Trend analysis

6.1 Timezone Analysis

To understand the evolution trend of this research domain, we can analyze with
two approaches: the popular keywords used along the academic field development or
the burst detection in the usage of specific keyword or citation of specific article. The
data on keywords is computed into a timezone view as shown in Figure 8. The graph
shows the popular phrases used over an approximate 20-year period (that is,
2000-2019).
The keyword “sustainability” is found in the related articles as early as 2003 and
this suggests the earlier involvement into this domain is closely related to
sustainability. Later, the most frequent repeating phases such as “perspective”,
“strategy”, “performance”, “management” within the next five years (2004-2007)
suggest the debate and framework on company perspective. Then, emerging phrases
like “supply chain management”, “environmental performance”, “stakeholder theory”,
“developing country”, “disclosure” and “environmental management” in the
following 3 years (2008-2010) may suggest the focus on supply chain ethical issue
that has been widely discussed during that period. From then on, the keywords are
found to become increasingly fragmented which in this case suggests a steady and
consistent development of this particular academic field. Various topics such as
environmental, stakeholder engagement, consumer and legitimacy are focused. For
the most recent 2 years (2018-2019), the main themes shown in this finding revolve
around investor, business performance, integration, social sustainability and adoption.
 Figure 8 Timezone view of popular keywords

6.2 Analysis of Research Frontier

The sudden increase in the usage of specific keywords or citations of particular

papers can be visualized by utilizing burst term detection function in CiteSpace. The
citation burst of articles and keywords are shown in Figure 9 and 10. Burst terms, or
keywords with strong citation counts surge over a short period of time can be used for
better insight of the development trend and future direction (Li and Chen, 2016). With
a similar theory, this is also applicable to the burst citation of specific article as an
indicator of research frontiers and trends. As shown in Figure 9, the burst terms in this
research field changed over time. In chronological order, they are environment,
mining, corporate, organization, market, initiative, china, stakeholder, legitimacy,
reputation, institutional theory, conceptual framework and climate change over the 15
years’ period (2005-2019). The long term burst citation of keywords such as corporate
(2008-2015); mining (2008-2014) and environment (2005-2010) may indicate the
topics related to these phases are more impactful and influential to the CSR/SD
domain. And recently, climate change related topics have been growing fast with the
strongest burst from 2016 to present.
 Figure 9 Citation burst of keywords over time

On the other hand, Figure 10 demonstrate the cited literature bursts over years in
this CSR/SD domain. It is observed that high burst strength articles such as Carroll
AB, 2010; Porter ME, 2006; Bansal P, 2005; and Seuring S, 2008 are also in the list
of top cited articles as shown in Table 4. Highly cited research paper of the particular
period is also an indicator of the popular topic or rising concern during that time. Thus
by understanding the content of the recent burst cited literature, we can catch a
glimpse of the current research frontier. According to the strongest burst references
shown in Figure 10, the recent highly cited articles include Hahn T, 2010; Scherer AG,
2011; Carroll AB, 2010; Dhaliwal DS, 2011 and Carter CR, 2011. In the paper written
by Hahn T, he points out the trade-off and conflict in corporate sustainability in CSR
operation that the mainstream researcher tends to ignore has led to a limited
perspective on corporate contributions to sustainable development. Thus, he proposed
an initial framework for the analysis of trade-offs that aims for a more systematic
analysis of these factors (Hahn et al., 2010).
 Figure 10 Citation burst of articles over time

Scherer AG observed that many firms start to fulfill their social and political
responsibilities that go beyond legal requirements and fill the regulatory vacuum in
global governance. The literature reviewed on CSR shows the number of politicized
CSR concept proposals from various disciplines is growing and the author suggested
the implication of this new perspective for theorizing about the business firm,
governance, and democracy (Scherer and Palazzo, 2011). This viewpoint is similarly
supported by the other author’s research, Carroll AB (2010), but in a different
viewpoint. Carroll AB reviewed and discussed the historical background, evolution
and debate of CSR, then he further analyzed the supporting factors of CSR operation
in business community perspective (Carroll and Shabana, 2010).
Dhaliwal DS examined the potential advantage that the firm can be benefit from
the initiation of CSR voluntary disclosure. The article concluded that company with
high cost of equity capital in the previous year tends to initiate disclosure of CSR
activities in the current year. Beside this, superb CSR performance will lead to a
subsequent reduction in the cost of equity capital while attracting investors and
analyst coverage (Dhaliwal et al., 2011).
Carter’s work on the systematic review of the sustainable supply chain
management (SSCM) found that SSCM evolve from a perspective and exploration of
standalone CSR research of social and environmental domain to the perspectives
convergence of sustainability as the triple bottom line and the emergence of SSCM as
a theoretical framework. They also demonstrated possibility for further advancing
theory, methodology, and the practical implications for further study (Carter and
Liane Easton, 2011).

6.3 Analysis of CSR/SD Evolution Trend

Base on the information and interpretation above, we can categorize the

evolutionary progress of CSR/SD academic field and the critical issues or concerns in
the specific period of time.
Stage one (1997-2004): Initial Phase
CSR and SD are still considered as two separate, unrelated topics in this stage.
Thus very low amount of CSR/SD co-themed publications can be seen in Figure 2
which is agreed with the result in Figure 7, Figure 8 and Figure 9, where no keyword
or citation burst is found during this period. However, the convergence of this two
distinctive concepts (CSR and SD) initiated with the emerging keyword
“sustainability” during 2003.
Stage two (2005- 2009): Debating Phase
Under the concern of environmental issues generated during the business activity,
the keyword “environment’ which is also as known as one of the fundamental
dimension in sustainability triple bottom line showed a bursting citation trend during
2005 and this further linked CSR to corporate sustainability in this stage. The
increasing concern over pollution in this period further fueled the development of the
idea that corporate should be taking responsibility to solve those problem. This can be
seen from the emerging keywords, such as “environmental ethics”, “business ethics”,
and from different clusters during 2005 in Figure 6. The beginning of burst citation on
the keyword “corporate” may also suggest the linkage of CSR to various aspects in
firms. With the timezone view of highly used keywords like: performance, financial
performance, perspective, strategy, and green, this further demonstrated the debating
stage of this topic in the academic field.
Stage three (2010-2013): Rapid Developing Phase
In this period, the keywords “mining” and “organization” show the strongest
bursts strength among all other cited keywords such as “market”, “initiative” and
“corporate”. This may suggest two streams of research are formed during this period.
The “mining’ keyword related revolved around the waste disposal problem which is
highly polluting to the environment. Other keywords revealed the significant increase
in the experimental progress of CSR/SD into market, organization, corporate and the
assessment the feasibility and sustainability of the operation. This is supported by the
frequent use of keyword disclosure, framework, determinant, and decision making.
Stage four (2014-2019): Research Specialization Phase
Two different observations can be found in this phase. First, the expectation of
CSR to resolve environmental concerns is gradually developing into a global scale.
This can be proven by the evolution of keywords from “environment” to “mining”
and finally to “climate change”. The high bursts strength also crucially suggest public
concern and attention of such issues around the world. Secondly, the keywords
“institutional theory”, “stakeholder”, “legitimacy”, “reputation” and “conceptual
framework” which are frequently used during this period reveal the implementation of
CSR into company SD strategy and the research on exploring and solving those
potential problems. This result agrees with the finding above on the several high
bursts of cited article during similar period, where the studies revolve around the
benefit and trade-off from distinctive perspectives.

7. Conclusion and Discussion

7.1 Main Findings and contributions

The objective of this study was to present a holistic picture of the CSR research
related to SD to figure out the knowledge map between these two topics. We used a
bibliometric analysis method mainly to conduct co-author analysis, co-country
analysis, co-citation analysis of authors and articles, co-word analysis, keyword
cluster analysis, timeline and timezone analysis, burst detection of keywords and
articles, etc. on the CSR/SD related scientific literature in the WoS/SSCI database
from 1990 to 2019. The CiteSpace software (V5.3.R4) is used to this quantitatively
analysis and visualizing the knowledge map of the CSR/SD scientific research.
Followed by further interpretation and analysis, the developing status, research
hotspot and frontier evolution were identified. The main findings are as follows:
Firstly, the annual publication trend of CSR researches related to SD shows a
significant increasing trend after 2007 and a far more rapid growth in these two years,
which suggests the dual themed research is getting more extensive attention in the
academic field. This is similar to one research exploring the integration of corporate
sustainability into strategic management (Engert et al., 2016). The source of
publications analysis found that the top 3 influential publishers are Corporate Social
Responsibility and Environment Management; Sustainability; and Journal of Cleaner
Production. This is consistent with the bibliometric analysis results of previous studies
focus in CSR (Low and Siegel, 2019) or SD (Zemigala, 2019) fields.
Secondly, the author analysis identified a number of authors that are highly
productive in this CSR/SD domain, but the fragmentary pattern of co-author network
suggests a low level collaboration between authors with an exception between a trio
academic partnership by Garcia-Sanchez I.M., Galindo-Alvarez I. and Amor-Esteban
V. This means most studies on this specific topic are done independently. The
affiliation analysis identified Top 3 universities contribute most: Bucharest University
of Economic Studies, University of Salamanca, and Universitat Jaume I. The
country/region analysis identified that Spain and England have most publications, and
cross-national co-operations occur within groups: China, England and Netherlands;
Australia and USA; while Spain shows strong independence. This result is consistent
with other findings on bibliometric analysis of SD that most papers published in
Europe, North America and Far East (Zhu and Hua, 2016). What’s more, the
co-citation analysis identified Porter ME, Carroll AB etc. are the most influential
authors in the CSR/SD study.
Thirdly, the co-occurrence analysis of keywords in CSR/SD indicated that the
keywords “performance” and “management” are highly concerned in current study.
The hot spot analysis categorized the keywords into 11 clusters. These clusters with
distinctions are summarized into different themes, which are “stakeholder”, “CSR
reporting”, “performance”, “external reporting”, “local sustainability”, “modelling”,
“social”, “market”, “online”, “NGO” and “development”. These 11 clusters are highly
concerned issues which are also the hotspots that most researchers in the CSR/SD
domain focus on, especially in recent years (see e.g., Garriga and Mele, 2004; Kolk
and van Tulder, 2010; Babiak and Trendafilova, 2011; Aguinis and Glavas, 2012;
Hahn, 2013; Bocken et al., 2014; Cheng et al., 2014; Fahimnia et al., 2015; Adams et
al., 2016; Behringer and Szegedi, 2016; Morioka and de Carvalho, 2016; Feng et al.,
2017; Williams et al., 2017; Olawumi and Chan, 2018; Singh, et al., 2019; Zhang et
al., 2019; Bhatt et al., 2020; Singh et al., 2020).
Fourthly, when clusters are displayed horizontally along timelines, we found that
the biggest cluster related to “stakeholder” started on 2005 and lasted always till to
now, which shows its prominent positioning in this CSR/SD domain (e.g., Peloza
and Shang, 2011; Beckmann et al., 2014; Kim et al., 2014; Rodrigues and Mendes,
2018; Jabbour et al., 2019a, 2019b; van der Waal and Thijssens, 2020). The other
long lasting cluster is “NGO” related focusing on NGO-business partnership (e.g.,
Wadham, 2009; Baur and Schmitz, 2012; Stekelorum et al., 2019), which is still
active on year 2019. In addition, the earliest higher frequency keyword “sustainability”
emerged in the “social” related cluster.
Lastly and more importantly, the timezone analysis on high occurring terms
showed the development of popular keywords used along the CSR/SD academic field
has been over 20 years, with the earlier involvement of “sustainability”, then focusing
on “strategy”, “performance”, and later “environmental performance”, “stakeholder”,
“developing country”, “disclosure” and “supply chain management”, etc., being
increasingly fragmented. The citation bursts of specific keywords or articles suggest
the expectation on CSR as an effective tool to resolve environmental issue is
gradually rising in a global scale. The 13 burst terms changed over 15 years
(2005-2019) figured out the evolvement of research frontiers in this field and
indicated the close relationship between CSR and SD. Among which, “climate change”
(2016-2019) is the newest but strongest burst. The top 3 strongest burst articles are
Carroll AB (2010), Porter ME (2006) and Bansal P (2005), while the recent highly
cited articles are Hahn T (2010), Scherer AG (2011), Carroll AB (2010), Dhaliwal DS
(2011) and Carter CR (2011).
Besides these findings, the evolution trend is classified into 4 distinctive stages:
initial stage (1997-2004) when no significant study was found; debating phase
(2005-2009) when it shows the initial debating of CSR involvement into corporate
performance; rapid developing phase (2010-2013) suggests the decision making and
evaluation of CSR into firm’s strategy; and research specialization phase (2014-2019)
shows the implementation of CSR into company SD strategy and indicates the
dispersion of the field.
Based on these quantitative and visualizing knowledge mapping analyses, we
make contributions to an overall understanding of the knowledge structure between
CSR and SD, which suggesting the developing involvement of CSR to SD in
academic field. (1) We provided an overview of publication trend and distribution,
which suggests the co-themed CSR and SD is a lasting but recent prosperous research
topic. (2) We identified the most productive authors, institutions and countries/regions
and their co-operation networks, and further analyzed the top cited authors and
articles together with their clusters, which figured out a picture of the most impactful
and influential research bodies in CSR and SD field, and could be helpful for seeking
knowledge basis. (3) We revealed the research hotspots and identified the clusters
along with their formation and evolution, which figures out the high concerned topics
and themes in this domain. (4) We uncovered the evolution process of CSR/SD
academic research, detected the research frontiers and classified the distinct evolution
stages, which points the way towards future study and also be helpful for seeking
knowledge basis in the CSR/SD field.

7.2 Limitations and Future Research

The current study also has some limitations. First of all, there are several typical
limitations related to bibliometric analysis. The analyzed data in this study was
downloaded from WoS/SSCI database (04/08/2019), therefore, data from other
databases or collected at different times may have different results and conclusions
(Zemigala, 2019). In addition, this study limited to scientific articles and limited the
search phrases to [“Corporate Social Responsibility”] and [“Sustainable
Development”], which ensured the scientific significance and avoided high pollution
in the dataset (Kajikawa et al., 2007; Zhu and Hua, 2017; Zemigala, 2019), while, as a
result, the analyses may not fully cover all available documents (Li et al., 2019) and
may lead to incomplete list of articles related to the CSR/SD academic field. Besides
that, we used theme (covering titles, abstracts and keywords) as search range, those
only searched in article titles or keywords may lead to other findings. These
limitations can be addressed in future research by extending the coverage of databases
and types of documents and using similar terms.
Even so, based on our review and findings in this present study, we could
suggest several prospective opportunities for future research. Although there seems to
be a close relationship between SD and CSR in the academic field, the in-depth
connection is still very weak. There still exists some debates on the contribution of
CSR (which is a micro level) to SD (which is a macro level) (Dyllick and Muff, 2016;
Lamarche and Bodet, 2018). Therefore, how can CSR best contribute to SD?
Especially, how to involve it in achieving the SDGs? It needs to be further explored.
This is a rising trend in the near recent years, not limited to the international business
and large corporations, but also for the SMEs (Singh et al., 2019b; Bikele et al., 2020).
Current empirical studies on corporate engagement in the SDGs are scarce and
scattered and being lack of meaningful SDG disclosures in practice (van der Waal &
Thijssens, 2019), which calls for future studies a lot.
Besides this, the publication geographical concentration is uneven. Most of the
researches in the CSR/SD field are found to be in developed countries and in only
those developing countries with most rapid growth. Consequently, research in Africa
and South America turned out to be strongly underrepresented (with exceptions to
South Africa and Brazil). Due to the implementation differences of CSR and SDGs
across different national social, economic, governance and environmental systems
(Moon, 2007), there is a largely unexplored area for CSR in achieving SDGs in those
other countries and regions and will be a broad avenue available for further study.
Moreover, both CSR and SD are multilevel and multidisciplinary topics which
generally lead to different or even conflicting results and conclusions from different
point of views. Therefore, cross-discipline, cross-region, cross-culture or institutional
collaboration research should be encouraged, in order for a more complete view of
such issue can be discovered and discussed.
To conclude, this bibliometric analysis helps reflecting the development status of
CSR/SD research field in a precise way through the visualization of emerging trend
and currently focused topics. It is also helpful to find the knowledge basis and detect
the future research directions in this area.

Acknowledgments

This work was financially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation
of China (71502072), National social science foundation of China (16BJY073,
18BJY034), and Jiangsu Province Postgraduate Research and Practice Innovation
Project (No. KYCX18_2067). The authors would like to extend special thanks to the
editors and three anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments and
suggestions for improving the quality of this study. They also appreciate Joseph
Atherley for his revisions on the language of this article.
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Credit Author Statement

Nan Ye: Conceptualization, Methodology, Formal analysis,

Project administration; Tung-Boon Kueh: Data curation,

Formal analysis, Writing - Original draft preparation,

Visualization; Lisong Hou: Writing - Review & Editing;

Yongxin Liu: Supervision; Hang Yu: Writing - Review &

Editing
Declaration of interests

☒ The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships
that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

☐The authors declare the following financial interests/personal relationships which may be considered
as potential competing interests: