The Sustainable Company in the Academic Literature: a Bibliometric Analysis

Abstract

The sustainable company has drawn considerable interest over time as shown by the dataset that contains research papers spanning from 1982 to 2026. The objective of this article is to present a comprehensive overview of this subject and its evolution over time. Methodology: A bibliometric analysis is performed on the Web of Science database. No time filter was applied and 5563 articles from business-related categories were analyzed using Bibliometrix , a package of R Studio. Findings: The firsts papers were published between 1980-2000 and analyzed the corporate accountability for the social and physical environment, while exploring frameworks for creating sustainable companies. Over the next two decades, the focus shifted to sustainable business models, financial impact and company-level strategies. After COVID-19 crisis, sustainable supply chain management, circular economy, green innovations and ESG performance gained more interest, representing possible directions of future research. The main keywords cluster presents the close link between sustainability, performance, management and innovation. Performance is the theme that draws the most interest, being one of the most used keywords. The second cluster indicates the importance of governance in reaching social and environment objectives while the last one mentions the importance of SDGs and ethics within the CSR activities. The research is fragmented, both in the analyzed themes and in the author’s collaboration network, with the EU countries being one of the biggest producers of cited research papers next to USA, China and UK. UDC: [005.35:502.131.1]:001.811; JEL: M140