Growth Without Integration: A Bibliometric Audit of the ESG–Financial Performance Literature

Abstract

 The relationship between environmental, social and governance (ESG) performance and financial performance has generated one of the largest empirical literatures in management research, and a steady supply of reviews summarising it. This study audits that literature rather than summarising it. Search strings are treated as measurement instruments: calibrated in stages, diagnosed for precision and recall, and reported with their failures intact. The resulting corpus of 2,923 documents is mapped along four dimensions: conceptual, thematic, intellectual and social structure.Three findings converge from independent evidence. The conceptual core occupies the basic quadrant of the thematic map: connected to everything, internally coherent with almost nothing. The citation base has bifurcated, with a contemporary ESG measurement school of 22 works forming separately from the corporate social performance tradition rather than absorbing it. The social structure fragments into 221 components, the largest holding nine of 6,600 authors, with productivity departing sharply from Lotka’s law. The literature grows without integrating. Its vocabulary has also turned over almost completely, and a direct test shows this was displacement rather than relabelling: the co-word neighbourhood of ESG performance today overlaps that of corporate social responsibility before 2015 by only 11 per cent.Two methodological findings follow. Keyword screening reproduced manual inclusion decisions at 95.4 per cent raw agreement but a Cohen’s kappa of 0.297, because unit of analysis is a property of research design rather than of vocabulary. And because Scopus uses one delimiter between references and between authors, naive parsing silently returns the final author of each cited work.