From Business Models to Sustainability Claims: Disciplinary Themes and Evidence Gaps in BRICS Sharing-Economy Research

This study examines how disciplinary themes and sustainability questions are represented in the supplied bibliometric analysis of sharing-economy research associated with Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. The issue is consequential because platform growth and resource access are often described as sustainable without measuring distributional, labor, or environmental outcomes. Using the source manuscript’s Web of Science category counts, thematic-map table, and country-keyword matrix, we conduct a structured interpretive synthesis while treating the supplied coding as exploratory. Three results emerge: (1) business and management categories coexist with environmental science, sustainability, tourism, computing, engineering, law, and transport; (2) the keyword map places “sharing economy” and “business model” among central topics, alongside accommodation, mobility, blockchain, circular economy, and sustainability; and (3) the manuscript’s country matrix suggests uneven geographic specificity, but gives no reproducible coding protocol and therefore cannot support robust country comparisons. The evidence maps attention, not impact: it does not establish that sharing practices reduce emissions, improve equity, or create decent work. Future studies should link platform-level, household, worker, and environmental outcome data across comparable cases.