Bridging foundations and frontiers in responsible innovation: a quantitative map of knowledge bases and emerging themes

As Responsible Innovation (RI) principles are applied to frontier areas such as emerging technologies, a key question is whether this expansion reflects deep integration of RI’s core commitments or surface-level adoption. To address this, this study combines a systematic literature review with bibliometric mapping. Co-citation analysis identifies the field’s four knowledge bases, and keyword co-occurrence delineates seven emerging themes, including artificial intelligence, digital health, and digital agriculture. We also introduce a foundations-to-frontiers alignment framework to analyze how emerging themes draw upon the field's knowledge bases and visualize it in a heatmap. The analysis reveals four differentiated reliance pathways across RI themes, namely theoretical-institutional, governance-critique, corporate implementation, and integrative pathways, and identifies a cross-cutting principle-to-method gap, with methodological foundations remaining comparatively weakly represented across most themes. The study delivers a quantitative structural map of the RI field and outlines a data-informed agenda to strengthen the alignment between RI principles and practice.