A bibliometric analysis of corporate social responsibility in sustainable development

The involvement of corporate social responsibility (CSR) in sustainable development (SD) is becoming a popular topic on research and business domain. However, the co-themed research is still rather new and hasn't been fully studied. An in-depth bibliometric analysis using the 'CiteSpace' software is applied to analyze and visualize the knowledge map of the CSR research related to SD. Main findings show that the CSR involvement in SD is a lasting but recent prosperous research topic. The top 3 influential journals in this area are Corporate Social Responsibility and Environment Management; Sustainability; and Journal of Cleaner Production. Porter ME, Carroll AB, etc., are the most impactful authors. The co-author network is fragmented, while cross-national co-operations occur in groups. 11 clusters are identified to be highly concerned, among which, stakeholder and NGO are long lasting till now. 13 burst terms has changed over 15 years (2005-2019) indicated the research frontiers evolution in this field, with the earliest sustainability to strategy, performance and then stakeholder, developing country, disclosure and supply chain management, etc., and climate change being the newest but strongest. Four stages of the evolution can be identified: initial phase (1997-2004), debating phase (2005-20 09), rapid developing phase (2010-2013), and research specialization phase (2014-2019). Finally, contributions, limitations and further research directions are discussed. (c) 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.