Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) Following its First Application: A Bibliometric Analysis

The transition from the Non-Financial Reporting Directive (NFRD) to the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) stimulated research on the implications of this sustainability reform. The discussion began far before the first application of the directive and spanned transversal sectors (e.g., management, accounting, economics, and finance). Studies on this topic aimed to explore both the requirements and the implications of the CSRD. Given this picture, the aim of this paper is to analyze the scientific production on the CSRD relying on a bibliometric analysis of the literature from the first paper published on this topic to date. To do so, I employed a bibliometric analysis on a sample of 117 papers addressing the CSRD, analysing them through co-citation analysis, bibliographic coupling, and keyword analysis. The cluster analysis of the keywords revealed a great attention to severe themes (i.e., sustainability, stakeholders, climate change, regulation, management perspectives, sustainable development, corporate sustainability, sustainability reporting, biodiversity, indicators, and performance). Following the analysis and discussion, this paper highlights the key features of studies on CSRD and provides insights and implications for both scholars and companies. To the best of my knowledge, this is the first comprehensive work on a systematic analysis of the literature on the CSRD.