The Structure of Social and Environmental Accounting Research: A Citation-Based Social Network Analysis

We investigate the structure and progress of the emergent field of social and environmental accounting (SEA) research by combining social network analysis (SNA) with a systematic literature review based on 461 papers containing 26,872 citations in total. Our approach, which to the best of our knowledge this study is the first to apply, enables us to use research metrics to identify the knowledge database of SEA research and examine how the field has been evolving. We analyze the connections and structure of foundational SEA research spanning the period 1973–2015. In line with previous research, our results reveal network characteristics typical of an emerging field—that is, subgroups without distinguishing content characteristics and low network density. Our additional analyses show that the results remain unchanged until 2021. The state-of-the-art SNA we apply, the knowledge database we identify, and the insights into the SEA field's structure that we provide support the growth of the field.