A Bibliometric Analysis on Sustainability in Business Ethics: The Global Trend in Scopus Database (2004-2020)

Abstract

In this century, the word "sustainability" and "Business Ethics" have been spoken widely in business ethics field. Business ethics comprises two words: "business" and "ethics", which cover the areas of moral principles, beliefs, values, culture, governance issues and a code of conduct for business. Over the decades, researchers have been conducted to various studies on business ethics, as well as to investigate the importance of business ethics. However, the global trend of this area received limited attention, particularly through the method of bibliometric analysis. Hence, the purpose of the study is to evaluate global research in form of bibliometric analysis of business ethics and its growth of publications from 2004 to 2020 from Scopus database. Bibliometric analysis is believed that it can contribute in the way of suggesting future directions for the scholars in the particular discipline. This study used VOS Viewer to analyze and visualize the global research trend on 'Sustainability in Business Ethics' in analyzing the bibliographic data. Bibliometric maps were retrieved from VOS Viewer. In this study, the research details such as coauthorship, leading countries in the research, top scholars and leading key words of business ethics related studies are analyzed and included. The number of publications has been escalating steadily since 2011. The United States and United Kingdom were the leading countries among the affiliated countries. Two of the leading universities were from the world's top 100 universities, which calling for more attention from the universities to study or explore about Sustainability in business ethics context. The study contributed insights of business ethics related areas to the academics for further research This paper can be beneficial for academicians, organizations, and business policymakers in understanding the global trend of 'Sustainability in Business Ethics' besides discovering the future directions and opportunities for future studies.