Mapping the research landscape of business ethics, corporate governance, and corporate social responsibility: A bibliometric and citation analysis

Abstract

The primary objective of the study is to present a comprehensive review and citation analysis of publication data in the interrelated disciplines of "Business Ethics," "Corporate Governance," and "Corporate Social Responsibility." The publication data was obtained from the Clarivate Analytics Web of Science SSCI (Social Science Citation Index) and Elsevier Scopus for bibliometric and citation analysis. The data covers a time span of 2003–2023 for WoS and 1999–2023 for Scopus, with 306 documents for WoS and 347 documents for Scopus after suitable filtrations. The study further evaluates the differences in citation counts across Scopus, Web of Science (WoS), and Google Scholar (GS) for the common top 30 most cited articles based on the WoS and Scopus datasets. The most cited articles in the field are all relatively recent and published in high-impact journals. This suggests that this area is a growing and dynamic field of research. The findings of the study revealed publication trends, prominent journals, leading articles, the most productive countries, and the comparative citation analysis that has garnered significant contributions to the literature. The research publication is an excellent resource for researchers, scholars, and practitioners interested in learning about and contributing to this field. Furthermore, the study will lay the groundwork for future studies in this area.