Sustainable Development and Corporate Social Responsibility: a bibliometric analysis of International Scientific Production

Abstract Corporate social responsibility has been discussed with the objective of improving the understanding of the performance of organizations in the context of sustainable development. But, what are the highlighted problems in current scientific literature and where are they pointing to? This study analyzed international scientific publications related to Sustainable Development and Corporate Social Responsibility, providing a map of published studies. The bibliometric analysis of studies published in Web of Science from 1998 to 2015 found 197 articles, written by 402 authors, linked to 246 institutions from 43 countries. Looking for relevance criteria and currentness, literature analysis organized the studies into two groups: the most mentioned and the most recent articles. Through the analysis of the main contributions of these publications, it was possible to identify seven key problems: Ontology, Factors for adoption of sustainable initiatives, Performance evaluation, Social and/or environmental impacts, Sustainability reports, Education and Sustainability as a strategy. Opportunities for future research on each problem are suggested.