Longitudinal Study of Research Interest on Sustainability Reporting: A Bibliometric Analysis

This study presents a bibliometric analysis and a debate on the ongoing interest in European directives and international initiatives on corporate sustainability reporting. The objective of the study is to observe the interest of researchers in various topics related to sustainability reporting requirements over the last five years. The data used in this research was selected based on the PRISMA method to Web of Science (WOS) database. The database generated a total number of 572 articles. A plethora of features characterizing the research on sustainability reporting over the last five years reveal interesting results. The most researched topic in sustainability reporting research is Global Reporting Initiative, followed by non-financial reporting directives and integrated reporting framework. A VOS Viewer representation of the most used keywords related to sustainability reporting have been performed for the sampled data. The overall conclusion is that GRI is the favorite of companies that want to present their sustainability performance and the favorite topic approached by researchers. These results point out that authors affiliated to the Bucharest University of Economic Studies made a significant contribution especially to the GRI research. The main contribution of this study resides in the two-fold analysis of sustainability reporting, mirroring the continuous development of guidelines, initiatives, standards, and regulations at international and European levels in academics’ research addressed from companies’ perspectives and practices.