What's the Holdup? Sustainability Reporting's Uneven Push into Areas of “Old Guard” Traditional Accounting: A Bibliometric Analysis^*

Terminology in the Fields of SEA and Traditional Accounting

While the field of SEA has been established for decades (Bebbington, Larrinaga, et al., 2023; Zupic & Čater, 2015), the terminology for reporting has changed in line with the evolving understanding of public interest. In the 1990s, when Kaplan and Norton (1992) put forth the balanced scorecard that is still widely used today, “non-financial” measures took to the mainstream. In the years since, non-financial reporting has come to encompass a variety of measures for firms, sometimes including social and environmental measures. Recently, however, a push has occurred to reframe non-financial measures in a more positive light—one that does not rely on an anchoring to the financial. Baumüller and Sopp (2021) note that this was discussed in the European Lab's Project Task Force on Non-Financial Reporting Standards when they suggested “changing the name of the relevant reporting requirements from ‘non-financial reporting’ to ‘sustainability reporting’” to create more positive terminology and to underline the fact that financial and sustainability information are closely linked and thus more complementary than the opposing elements of corporate reporting (as negative terminology might imply) (p. 19). Within this broad frame of non-financial reporting comes a variety of reports. Here, we focus on CSR reporting, sustainability reporting, and ESG reporting.

Bibliometric Analysis

We chose bibliometric analysis as the analytical tool because of its capability to accurately process hundreds or even thousands of documents from reliable data sets and because the use of this analytical tool is novel in this area. Past bibliometric analyses have been conducted in the sustainability research discourse; however, they explore more specific subjects, such as CSR and leadership (Zhao et al., 2022), CSR in communications (Ji et al., 2022), sustainability research in marketing (Chabowski et al., 2011), sustainable business performance (Bota-Avram, 2022), sustainability and performance measurement systems (PMSs, a subset of managerial accounting) (Leite et al., 2012), educating business students about sustainability (Cullen, 2017), and integrated thinking and reporting toward sustainable business models (Di Vaio et al., 2020). None of these bibliometric analyses provide a holistic picture of the sustainability accounting field as it intersects with traditional accounting over time. We endeavor to present such a picture by identifying the clusters of research in sustainability reporting that intersect with traditional accounting over the past 10 years. In doing so, we highlight themes, landmark works, and authors, and point to gaps in the literature and promising areas of future research.

Bibliometric Analysis

The research design of this study is a bibliometric analysis. In keeping with Donthu et al. (2021), we conducted both a performance analysis and science mapping of the accumulated data set. Performance analysis is an objective form of analysis that includes summary data from a corpus of text. As shown in Figures 1 and 2 (see Section 4), performance analysis assesses the volume and distribution of the articles in the corpus.

Science mapping is performed by bibliometric analysis software and provides useful information beyond the performance analysis. While performance analysis focuses on the contributions in research, science mapping focuses on relationships between documents and authors in a given research field (Donthu et al., 2021). Beginning with Figure 4 (see Section 4), the maps show relationships and knowledge clusters (Mukherjee et al., 2022).

The results of the bibliometric analysis are presented using two enrichment techniques: clustering and visualization. These are automatically generated by the VOSviewer, a software option recognized by Donthu et al. (2021). Visualizations contain elements such as lines and nodes, which are explained in Section 4. Clusters, presented in Section 4, are color-coded, enabling researchers to glean particular themes associated with each cluster.

Search Terms

Prior research was carefully considered before settling on the final list of primary and secondary terms (Table 1). The primary terms were (1) “financial account*,” (2) “managerial account*” OR “environmental management,” (3) “audit*” OR “assurance,” (4) “tax*,” and (5) “sustainab*” AND “account*.” The asterisk in each search term serves as a wildcard. For instance, “tax*” would pick up words such as “taxation,” “taxes,” or “taxing.” The first four of the five primary terms were chosen because they represent the four broad types of accounting, based on the authors' experience of teaching accounting courses for more than 15 years.

To each of the 5 primary terms, a set of 11 secondary terms was added: (1) “corporate social responsibility,” (2) “sustainab*,” (3) “environmental, social and governance,” (4) “social and environmental account*,” (5) “non financial reporting,” (6) “non-financial reporting,” (7) “global climate change,” (8) “global warming,” (9) “environmental performance,” (10) “environmental reporting,” and (11) “ESG reporting.”

The secondary terms were added using the Boolean “AND.” For instance, here is an excerpt of code using the primary term “financial account*” and secondary terms “corporate social responsibility” and “sustainab*”: (“financial account*” AND “corporate social responsibility”) OR (“financial account*” AND “sustainab*”).

The secondary terms were chosen after consulting with a subject matter expert on sustainability accounting (Donthu et al., 2021) and after experimenting with a longer list of terms. Words and phrases that were tried, but ultimately excluded, were “green house gas emissions”; “circular economy”; “social responsibility disclosures”; “integrated reporting”; “sustainable development goals”; “nonfinancial reporting”; “sustainability accounting” (as opposed to “sustainab*” AND “account*”); “disclosur*”; and “social” AND “account*” AND “sustainab*.” These terms were excluded because they yielded spurious results from the fields of natural science, engineering, and even performance arts. The terms presented in Table 1 represent the upper threshold of the number of terms that are feasible; other bibliometric analyses have used as few as three terms and no expansion from primary to secondary terms (Bota-Avram, 2022).

Database

The data for the bibliometric analysis were retrieved from the core collection of the Web of Science (WOS) in May 2023. The WOS database was chosen because it has the broadest time coverage and includes publications that are more than 40 years old that are relevant to our search. For instance, publications in the social sciences, beginning in 1956, are included in WOS, but those with cited reference data (necessary for our analysis) only began in 1996 in an alternative database, Scopus (Meho & Yang, 2007). We used our university credentials to create a free account to access all of the functionalities of the WOS search engine. Document type was restricted to articles published in English. The search was further restricted to the three most relevant WOS categories—management, business, and business finance—and to the WOS Social Sciences Citation Index1 and the Emerging Sources Citation Index.2 No other restrictions were used at the initial search stage for country, author, or research area.

Keywords were used to search article titles, abstracts, author keywords, and KeyWords Plus.3 The journals searched were restricted to only those on the Financial Times FT50 list or the Australian Business Deans Council (ABDC) list (2022 version) with a rating of A*, A, or B.4 The time horizon was restricted to the last 10 years, with articles published from January 1, 2013, through December 31, 2022. These boundaries (both time and lists) were used to restrict the set of search results (Paul & Criado, 2020). Without any boundaries, results exceeded 5,000 articles, which would render the science mapping technique of the bibliometric analysis unfeasible.

WOS Search

The 5 buckets of primary terms and the 11 secondary terms (Table 1) resulted in a final sample size of 905 articles (810, after removing duplicates) from WOS. Full records including cited references were exported in text format (.txt) from WOS and uploaded into the VOSviewer for bibliometric analysis.5 The data set of 810 articles was sufficient to warrant bibliometric analysis because the set was in the hundreds or thousands (Donthu et al., 2021), as opposed to, say, only in the dozens.

Performance Analysis

Three types of performance analyses were used: publication-related metrics, citation-related metrics, and citation- and publication-related metrics (Donthu et al., 2021). Total publications (a publication-related metric) are shown by category (Figure 1) and by year (Figure 2). A citation-related metric is shown in Figure 3, and a citation- and publication-related metric is shown in Table 2.

Figure 1 shows total publications, broken down by primary category. A total of 810 results were returned, distributed as follows: 1 from the search term “financial account*,” 89 from “management account*” OR “environmental management,” 188 from “audit*” OR “assurance,” 91 from “tax*,” and 441 from “sustainab*” AND “account*.”

Figure 2 shows the breakdown over time of articles. An uptick in articles was seen beginning in approximately 2019. From 2013 through 2018, fewer than 100 articles were found per year. The largest number of publications (209) occurred in 2022. Audit/assurance and tax categories have grown over time, while the growth in management accounting seems to have stabilized.

Figure 3 shows the number of total citations in the 810 articles in the corpus, by year of publication. This is a type of citation-related metric (see Donthu et al., 2021, tab. 2). The citations may be from any year between the article's publication and the date of data collection for this study.

Articles published in 2015 had the greatest number of citations (2,790), followed by articles published in 2019 (2,432 citations). Total citations have decreased in number since 2019, likely because newer articles tend to need more time to accumulate citations.

Table 2 lists the articles in the corpus with over 100 citations. This is a type of citation- and publication-related metric—the i-index, with i = 100 (see Donthu et al., 2021, tab. 2). The list contains 27 articles, with the earliest article being published in 2013 and the most recent article being published in 2021. Remarkably, no articles in the list were published in 2020 or 2022; therefore, the article published in 2021 (“Supply Chain Sustainability: Learning from the COVID-19 Pandemic”; Sarkis, 2021), with over 100 citations, is unusually popular.

Science Mapping

The three types of bibliometric analyses performed in this study and described in this section are co-citation analysis, bibliographic coupling, and co-word analysis. These three were selected because they were recommended by Donthu et al. (2021) to review the “past, present, and future of a research field” (p. 292). The past is reflected in co-citation, the present in bibliographic coupling, and the future in co-word analysis. Co-word analysis is also specifically recommended by these authors to “enrich understanding about the thematic clusters derived from co-citation analysis or bibliographic coupling” (Donthu et al., 2021, p. 289).

Two other types of bibliometric analysis—citation analysis and coauthorship analysis—were not performed in this study. Citation analysis can be done within a corpus of text to show how many times a particular document was cited by other papers in the corpus. Coauthorship is another type of relational analysis that examines the countries or institutions with which authors are affiliated. Therefore, both citation analysis and coauthorship analysis can shed light on the social interactions within a research field. Because social interactions were not the aim of this study, we did not include citation analysis or coauthorship analysis. The enrichment techniques used in this study to supplement bibliometric analysis are clustering and visualization.

4.2 Bibliographic Coupling by Document

The sample of 810 individual articles was analyzed at a minimum threshold of at least 5 common documents (usually articles) (Bota-Avram, 2022), bringing the network down to 492 eligible articles. After eliminating items that were not connected with any others, 473 articles remained for the visualization (Figure 5). Each node in the figure represents an article from the corpus; the node size is the total link strength (TLS). The lines show which articles share documents in their reference lists. The thicker the line between two nodes, the more documents in the reference lists are shared between the two articles.

Node size reflects TLS, and the TLS of a node can be increased in two ways: by having more documents in common with another node or by being connected to more nodes. For example, Datt et al. (2019) had the highest TLS (105), and the article is connected to 10 other nodes. Articles with higher TLS tend to cite other papers by the same author; for example, Datt cites two other papers also by Datt. Naturally, all Datt articles, because they are written by the same author, tend to have overlapping reference lists.

The top 10 articles by TLS are listed in Table 4. The article with the greatest TLS (105) (“The Impact of Legitimacy Threat on the Choice of External Carbon Assurance: Evidence from the US”; Datt et al., 2019) was published in the Accounting Research Journal.

TABLE 4. Top 10 documents by TLS (bibliographic coupling)

	Document	Cluster	TLS
1	Datt, R. R., Luo, L., & Tang, Q. (2019). The impact of legitimacy threat on the choice of external carbon assurance: Evidence from the US. Accounting Research Journal, 32(2), 181–202	Blue	105
2	Dakhli, A. (2021). The impact of ownership structure on corporate social responsibility: The moderating role of financial performance. Society and Business Review, 16(4), 562–591	Yellow	102
3	Michelon, G., Pilonato, S., & Ricceri, F. (2015). CSR reporting practices and the quality of disclosure: An empirical analysis. Critical Perspectives on Accounting, 33, 59–78	Blue	97
4	Donkor, A., Djajadikerta, H. G., & Mat Roni, S. (2021). Impacts of combined assurance on integrated, sustainability and financial reporting qualities: Evidence from listed companies in South Africa. International Journal of Auditing, 25(2), 475–507	Blue	94
5	Asiaei, K., Bontis, N., Barani, O., & Jusoh, R. (2021). Corporate social responsibility and sustainability performance measurement systems: Implications for organizational performance. Journal of Management Control, 32(1), 85–126	Brown	94
6	Simoni, L., Bini, L., & Bellucci, M. (2020). Effects of social, environmental, and institutional factors on sustainability report assurance: Evidence from European countries. Meditari Accountancy Research, 28(6), 1059–1087	Blue	93
7	Hou, M., Liu, H., Fan, P., & Wei, Z. (2016). Does CSR practice pay off in East Asian firms? A meta-analytic investigation. Asia Pacific Journal of Management, 33, 195–228	Teal	89
8	LópezPuertas-Lamy, M., Desender, K., & Epure, M. (2017). Corporate social responsibility and the assessment by auditors of the risk of material misstatement. Journal of Business Finance & Accounting, 44(9–10), 1276–1314	Yellow	89
9	Bebbington, J., & Larrinaga, C. (2014). Accounting and sustainable development: An exploration. Accounting, Organizations and Society, 39(6), 395–413	Green	89
10	Nath, S. D., Eweje, G., & Bathurst, R. (2021). The invisible side of managing sustainability in global supply chains: Evidence from multitier apparel suppliers. Journal of Business Logistics, 42(2), 207–232	Red	86

• Notes: This list was created by the authors based on the VOSviewer analysis.

The colors on the network map (Figure 5) depict eight distinct clusters, each representing a particular theme (Table 5). Interestingly, while sustainability accounting shows a permeation into traditional areas of accounting (i.e., non-financial reporting, corporate governance, audit, tax, and management accounting), it also unexpectedly moved into supply chain management, marketing, and entrepreneurship. In line with our research question, we focus our discussion on the traditional accounting areas.

TABLE 5. Main themes from bibliographic coupling: Documents

		Total number of documents	Main themes
1	Red	99	Sustainable supply chain management
2	Green	87	Sustainable development and accounting
3	Blue	81	Assurance of CSR reporting and varying factors that affect the quality of disclosure
4	Yellow	72	CSR and audit quality and the influence of board composition on CSR
5	Purple	64	Marketing and sustainable development
6	Teal	30	Broad overview of sustainability practices in relation to SMEs
7	Orange	27	Corporate tax avoidance and CSR
8	Brown	13	Management accounting and CSR
	Total	473

• Notes: Traditional accounting areas are in bold type, while other disciplines beyond accounting are in regular type.

4.2.1 Green Cluster: Sustainable Development and Accounting

This cluster deals with accounting and sustainable development (Bebbington et al., 2017; Bebbington & Larrinaga, 2014), SEA, and the extant accounting system (accounting-based accountability) (Dillard & Vinnari, 2019). The cluster revolves around the tension between financial reporting and sustainability reporting (Unerman et al., 2018). Another similar area of research within the green cluster deals with the sustainability of accounting academia from the vantage point of a university setting (Gebreiter, 2022; Humphrey & Gendron, 2015).

4.2.2 Blue Cluster: Assurance of CSR Reporting and Factors That Affect Quality of Disclosure

The blue cluster deals with CSR reporting and factors that affect the quality of disclosure. Assurance of reports in light of corporate governance (Martínez-Ferrero & García-Sánchez, 2017b), including the impact of combined assurance on integrated, sustainability, and financial reporting quality (Donkor et al., 2021), or sustainability assurance reports in European contexts (Simoni et al., 2020), are investigated. Another theme that emerged in the blue cluster deals with the assurance of carbon accounting reports (Datt et al., 2018, 2019; Fan et al., 2021).

4.2.3 Yellow Cluster: CSR and Audit Quality and the Influence of Board Composition on CSR

Two immediate themes emerge from the yellow cluster. One set of peer-reviewed papers discusses the influence of board composition and its relationship with CSR reporting around the world (Ananzeh, 2022; Harun et al., 2020; Ma et al., 2020; Nekhili et al., 2017). The second theme revolves around the audit quality of CSR reporting (Dakhli, 2022; Hammami & Hendijani Zadeh, 2020; LópezPuertas-Lamy et al., 2017; W.-C. Sun et al., 2017).

4.2.4 Orange Cluster: Corporate Tax Avoidance and CSR

In the orange cluster, several peer-reviewed articles deal with tax-planning behaviors that mitigate financial constraints (J. Sun et al., 2023), business strategies associated with tax avoidance (Higgins et al., 2015), or the formulation of sustainability reporting in tax avoidance behavior among firms (Rudyanto & Pirzada, 2021; Xu et al., 2022; Ylönen & Laine, 2015).

4.2.5 Brown Cluster: Management Accounting and CSR

This cluster of research deals with the role of CSR and its integration with management accounting and control systems and performance measurement (Asiaei et al., 2021). One study in this cluster investigates a model where PMSs can play a role in translating socially responsible initiatives into enhanced performance in corporations (Asiaei & Bontis, 2019). Other articles delve into the environmental and social aspects of management control systems that translate into improved performance in the banking sector (Hummel et al., 2021), while conceptualizing sustainability control systems as analytical tools (Johnstone, 2019). Another genre of research in the brown cluster specifically deals with climate change and its impact on management accounting (Bui & de Villiers, 2017; Bui & Fowler, 2019; Mahmoudian et al., 2021).

4.3 Bibliographic Coupling by Journal

The sample of 810 individual articles came from 140 journals when applying a threshold of a minimum of 2 documents per source (articles per journal) (Bota-Avram, 2022). One hundred journals are included in the sources network map (Figure 6).

The journal with the most documents (69, indicated by the size of the node in Figure 6) was Meditari Accountancy Research. We summarize the top 10 journals in Table 6 and note that 2 of the top 10 journals have aims and scope outside of accounting.

TABLE 6. Top 10 journals by bibliographic coupling link strength

	Sources/journal name	Documents	Citations	TLS
1	Meditari Accountancy Research	69	715	2,583.1581
2	Social Responsibility Journal	49	485	1,472.8289
3	Critical Perspectives on Accounting	45	2,047	1,303.6052
4	British Accounting Review	26	750	1,134.9889
5	International Journal of Operations & Production Management	31	1,767	1,031.74
6	Journal of Applied Accounting Research	22	199	998.0894
7	Accounting Forum	19	183	765.5106
8	Accounting, Organizations and Society	16	763	698.6427
9	International Journal of Accounting and Information Management	13	218	642.933
10	International Journal of Auditing	11	94	629.5623

• Notes: This list was created by the authors based on the VOSviewer analysis. In this case, the TLS represents the total strength of the bibliographic coupling links between a given journal and other journals. Traditional accounting areas are in bold type, while other disciplines beyond accounting are in regular type.

The number of documents per source does not necessarily indicate scope or impact, though it could be related. The number of citations per publication may be a better measure of impact. Meditari Accountancy Research is the leader in terms of the number of documents (69), but it is not in the top 10 by citations per document. The leading journal in citations per document is the Journal of Supply Chain Management, with 252 citations per document. This journal had a TLS of 106, with only 2 documents cited in the entire sample of 810 individual articles. Critical Perspectives on Accounting had only 45 published articles, but it had 2,047 citations in total.

TLS indicates the total strength of the bibliographic coupling links between a given journal and other journals (Guo et al., 2019). This is related to total links, which is the number of “partner” journals for a given journal. Recall that in bibliographic coupling, “partners” are two articles that commonly cite the same item (Guo et al., 2019). Links indicate that a journal's publication(s) have references in common with other journal publications and thus are discussing associated topics. A greater number of links may indicate a broader scope of literature compared to a journal with fewer links. The leading journal in terms of links (and TLS) was Meditari Accountancy Research.

4.4 Bibliographic Coupling by Author

By performing a bibliographic coupling analysis on author names, one may recognize which authors have the most reach and impact in sustainability accounting. Within the 2,048 authors cited in the sample of 810 individual articles, a threshold of a minimum of 3 citations per author and 3 documents per author was set (Bota-Avram, 2022). This resulted in 40 authors being included in the visualization (Figure 7).

The impact and reach of authors can be measured by their TLS since it indicates that they are a central part of a network and therefore intensively involved in the scholarly dialogue (Bota-Avram, 2022). In Figure 7, the larger nodes indicate greater TLS.

The proliferation of an author can be measured by the number of documents published (Table 7). The author with the most publications (de Villiers) had 7 documents, while the author with the greatest TLS (383) was Tang.

TABLE 7. Top 10 authors in terms of bibliographic coupling link strength

Rank	Author	Documents	Citations	TLS
1	Tang, Qingliang	6	97	383
2	Luo, Le	6	172	372
3	O'Dwyer, Brendan	6	312	323
4	de Villiers, Charles	7	283	315
5	Kuzey, Cemil	4	74	311
6	Rodrigue, Michelle	4	62	269
7	la Torre, Matteo	3	177	269
8	Bebbington, Jan	3	337	261
9	Martínez-Ferrero, Jennifer	4	246	261
10	Dumay, John	4	199	249

• Notes: This list was created by the authors based on the VOSviewer analysis. TLS represents the total strength of the bibliographic coupling links between a given author and other authors. Values have been truncated to display integers only for easier analysis of the ordinal ranking of the authors.

Co-Word Analysis by KeyWords Plus

Co-word analysis allows us to explore the existing or future relationships among topics in a research field by focusing on the written content of the publication itself rather than on the mere existence of an article by features such as title or author. Notable words can give hints as to the nature of the work being done in sustainability accounting and the future research directions of full texts. Co-word analysis was used as a supplement to the co-citation analysis and the bibliographic coupling (Donthu et al., 2021).

Figure 8 shows the vast network of keywords. The largest nodes in each color group represent the words with the greatest occurrence—for example, “performance,” “disclosure,” and “environmental-management.” Examples of words with smaller nodes include “risk,” “growth,” and “csr disclosure.” Notably, KeyWords Plus treats “csr disclosure” as a different keyword from “csr,” and for this reason, some words are understated in terms of occurrence and strength.

The average number of citations for each KeyWords Plus keyword represents the number of citations in documents where the keyword occurs. The keyword with the highest average number of citations (88) is “operations,” although it has a low occurrence (8).

Analyzing the average publication year of each KeyWords Plus keyword provides information about the evolution of sustainability accounting. The oldest KeyWords Plus keywords include words related to investing, such as “supply-chain management” (average publication year 2016), “issues” (2016), and “logistics” (2016). The newest KeyWords Plus keywords include words that reflect less tangible concepts, such as “decision-making” (2022) and “institutional pressures” (2021).

Emerging Subfields

The bibliometric methodologies used in this research enable us to discover the interrelated character of knowledge formation in the field of CSR reporting, sustainability reporting, and ESG that intersects with the role of accounting. Using co-citation analysis, the overall sample of 435 references can be traced back to the five clusters of germinal papers. Nevertheless, after reviewing the bibliographic coupling, three distinct subfields emerged: (1) marketing and sustainable development, (2) management accounting and CSR, and (3) sustainability practices in relation to SMEs. Interestingly, previous studies have highlighted the low number (or absence) of studies in the SME sector (Chung & Cho, 2018; ElAlfy et al., 2020). Similar findings have revealed the paucity of management accounting research penetrating into the sustainability context (Bebbington, Laine, et al., 2023; Garcia-Torea et al., 2023). Going forward, this emerging field should be given due attention as researchers continue to explore the intersection between traditional accounting and CSR, sustainability reporting, and ESG.

Journals and Authors

Meditari Accounting Research is the top journal based on the number of publications, with 69 individual peer-reviewed articles published over a 10-year period. Nevertheless, the total number of citations is only 715. Critical Perspectives on Accounting has only 45 articles but close to 2,050 citations over the same period. In addition, the most published author was Charles de Villiers, with 7 articles. Nevertheless, the citation count of de Villiers was only 283, while Bebbington led in citations with 337, despite having only 3 published articles.

KeyWords Plus

After reviewing the co-word analysis according to KeyWords Plus, eight distinct clusters emerged. The blue cluster, dealing with assurance and sustainability reporting, had the greatest number of keywords in the top 10: “performance,” “determinants,” and “quality.” The teal cluster, dealing with CSR, had the second-highest number of keyword occurrences: “corporate social responsibility” (159). The green cluster, dealing with sustainable supply chain management, had two of the most often occurring keywords: “impact” (128) and “sustainability” (120).

From the KeyWords Plus analysis, the most researched areas were assurance, CSR, supply chain management, and governance and disclosures. Interestingly, ESG did not come up in our analysis and did not seem to be a highly researched area during the period studied.

One of the key advantages of a bibliometric study is its ability to see patterns in research as they relate to “the big picture.” Our findings raise some important questions. First, since practice appears to be incorporating sustainability accounting more quickly than academia in traditional areas, is academic research falling behind practice? Alternatively, since practice and research appear to be moving at similar speeds, does more need to be done to embed sustainability accounting in traditional practice areas? Academics could address both possibilities by engaging further with practitioners, in keeping with some initiatives like Accounting for Impact (n.d.). Moreover, given the uneven spread of sustainability accounting, are accounting researchers and practitioners in the fields resisting its introduction, perhaps due to cultural differences in the various areas of traditional accounting in academia or practice? Investigating such behavioral barriers could lead to valuable insights within accounting to inform future approaches when incorporating innovations in accounting. Such findings could be of interest to partners at Big 4 firms, standard setters aiming to incorporate innovations, or regulators trying to understand the resistance of accountants to adopt new measures.

Directions for Future Research

One area of future research would be to complete a structured or systematic literature review of each of the heavily researched subfields mentioned in the previous section. This would help future researchers to quickly navigate the germinal papers and provide an excellent anchor for future studies of each cluster. Although the set of articles returned in the 10-year period numbered nearly 1,000, this research could be expanded to capture more years before 2013. If undertaken, this activity could provide a better understanding of the patterns of change and explore the literature in greater depth. With a few more decades added to the study period, the growth of the different clusters could be better explained. For instance, the keyword analysis would likely change because the use of KeyWords Plus is rare for articles before 1993. The reporting of the results could also be appropriately separated into chronological slices to compare the trends over time.

The present analysis identified the more prominent authors in sustainability accounting, but nothing regarding their specific topics of interest, motivations, or networks. Future work could reveal how the topic proliferated or how certain authors were influenced to explore their areas of interest.

Future studies with different search terms (i.e., “triple bottom line” and “carbon footprint”) and/or different databases, such as Scopus, could yield different findings. Finally, since financial accounting was least permeated by sustainability accounting, followed by management accounting, these intersections may be especially ripe for future research.