Mapping the ESG Research Landscape and Its Consumer Behavior Gap: A Systematic Literature Network Analysis

Abstract

This study maps research at the intersection of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues and consumer behavior. It identifies documents, sources, and authors with citation influence and examines the themes that shaped the corpus from 2011 to 2023. The review followed the PRISMA and SPAR-4-SLR guidelines. The final corpus contained 1,186 SSCI-indexed articles from the Web of Science Core Collection. VOSviewer was used for citation analysis, bibliographic coupling, and keyword co-occurrence. KH Coder was used to compare theme prevalence across six periods. Firm, finance, and disclosure studies accounted for much of the selected corpus. Organisational ESG Dynamics appeared across all periods, but no theme differed significantly after the Holm correction. Trust, perceived value, purchase intention, loyalty, and willingness to pay were outside the high-frequency keyword core. The study combines network mapping with period-based content analysis and identifies the limited visibility of consumer-response constructs within the selected corpus.