ENVIRONMENTAL AND SUSTAINABILITY REPORTING RESEARCH: A BIBLIOMETRIC ASSESSMENT OF TRENDS AND CONCEPTUAL SHIFTS

This study investigates the conceptual and thematic relationship between environmental and sustainability reporting through a descriptive bibliometric analysis. The search phrase used to collect relevant data from Web of Science was designed to encompass two sets of terms: broader sustainability-reporting methodology on one side and environmental or climate-related reporting terminology on the other. The final dataset includes 437 papers, covering the period from 1994 to 2025, analysed with Biblioshiny in R through thematic mapping and thematic evolution across three periods (1994–2013, 2014–2023, 2024–2025; 31, 283 and 123 records) and compared with the broader sustainability literature. Environmental-reporting terms such as environmental reporting and environmental disclosure sit in the same thematic clusters as sustainability-reporting and ESG terms, and author keywords diversify over time, with ESG, ESG disclosure, greenwashing and board gender diversity increasing significantly in 2024–2025 (governance disclosure weakly). Publication growth and thematic diversification coincide in time with the NFRD, the TCFD recommendations, the CSRD and the establishment of the ISSB; these are bibliometric associations, not evidence of regulatory causation. Because every record contains both vocabularies by construction, the findings describe vocabulary change within the intersection corpus and not the full history of either domain. The study contributes a map of how environmental and sustainability-reporting concepts have been combined in this literature.