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

The data was retrieved from the Scopus database, last updated on September 29, 2021, which thus formed the foundation for this 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. Therefore, a manual screening was conducted to eliminate the irrelevant fields for the current study. Subsequently, 981 documents were refined and introduced into a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet for further analysis.

本研究数据源自 Scopus 数据库，该数据库于 2021 年 9 月 29 日进行最后一次更新，因此构成了此次文献计量分析的基础。在第一阶段，研究人员在 Scopus 中使用了以下关键词进行搜索：“ESG”；“环境*” 或 “社会” 或 “治理” 或 “公司治理”；以及 “投资*” 或 “评分*” 或 “指数” 或 “评级提供商*” 或 “评级服务提供商*” 或 “可持续性” 或 “可持续”。此外，文章标题、摘要和作者关键词也被用作文档搜索的字符串。根据上述搜索关键词，从 2001 年至数据检索日期（2021 年 9 月 29 日）共提取了 1,110 份文献。尽管 Scopus 指定约 50% 的文献属于商业、经济或金融领域，但也有来自物理和天文学、毒理学与药理学、材料科学、生物化学、药理学、医学、遗传学与分子生物学以及化学等其他研究领域的出版物。因此，进行了人工筛选，以排除与当前研究不相关的领域。随后，981 份文献经过精炼，并被引入 Microsoft Excel 电子表格中进行进一步分析。