ESG Indices Research Domain: A Bibliometric Analysis of the Economics and Business Literature

Over the past two decades, there has been a significant trend in stakeholders’ request for greater transparency regarding corporate environmental, social and governance (ESG) performance. We can observe a diversification of methods that evaluate ESG performance through various indices, standards, ratings and sustainability frameworks. Nevertheless, ESG indices remain an underexplored object of academic inquiry. This article is conducting a comprehensive bibliometric analysis of ESG indices research within the economics and business literature, based on a dataset of 1420 Scopus-indexed publications. The findings of the systematic overview of the academic literature on ESG indices show an acceleration in scholarly output on ESG indices and citation activity in the post-2020 period, with Covid-19 being a key catalyst. Also, there is a small set of leading finance journals that influence the ESG indices research, and a skewed productivity distribution, between a small number of prolific contributors, and a large number of authors with limited output. The Academic production of output on ESG indices is strongly concentrated in a small group of countries, such as China, The United States, The United Kingdom, India and Italy, followed by a second European core, formed by France, Germany and Spain, that exhibit a balanced publication and citation performance. The findings illustrate promising future research directions on ESG indices, with consequences for academics, investors and policy-makers that need to take into account ESG-performance and investment frameworks.