Trajectories and connections in socio-environmental disclosure research: A bibliometric mapping

The objective of this research is to conduct a systematic review of scientific literature regarding socio-environmental disclosure. For this purpose, the Scopus and Web of Science journal databases were used to collect primary studies. Subsequently, the content of the abstracts was extracted using the content analysis technique. The analysis period of the corpus spans from 2009 to 2024, encompassing a total of 113 primary studies. The research protocol developed by Tranfield et al. (2003) was used, considering its stages: (i) review planning, (ii) review conduction, and (iii) report writing and dissemination of results. Additionally, the data from the final corpus were processed using the bibliometric software VOSviewer and Bibliometrix for comprehensive scientific mapping analysis. The analyzed results of the corpus indicate that the theme still has room for exploration in future studies. A co-citation analysis of the documents was also conducted, revealing three clusters of complementary strands: environmental disclosure practices, sustainability assurance, and organizational legitimacy. The corpus words were evaluated, revealing a measured association between construct performance (disclosure and corporate social responsibility - CSR) and other keywords. Among the pairs of words with statistically significant associations are "performance" and "organizations," as well as "legitimacy." These associations demonstrate a statistically significant relationship between the various measurement indicators related to Socio-environmental Disclosure. Finally, a list of future research proposals was provided so that those interested in the explored theme can further deepen their analysis of the knowledge on the subject in question.