Abstract

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to identify research trends related to ESG by domestic and overseas researchers so far, and to present research directions and clues for the possibility of applying ESG to Korean companies in the future and ESG practice through comparison of derived topics. Research design, data and methodology: In this study, as of October 20, 2022, after searching for the keyword 'ESG' in 'scienceON', 341 domestic papers with English abstracts and 1,173 overseas papers were extracted. For analysis, word frequency analysis, word co-occurrence frequency analysis, BERTopic, LDA, and OLS regression analysis were performed to confirm trends for each topic using Python 3.7. Results: As a result of word frequency analysis, It was found that words such as management, company, performance, and value were commonly used in both domestic and overseas papers. In domestic papers, words such as activity and responsibility, and in overseas papers, words such as sustainability, impact, and development were included in the top 20 words. As a result of analyzing the co-occurrence frequency of words, it was confirmed that domestic papers were related mainly to words such as company, management, and activity, and overseas papers were related to words such as investment, sustainability, and performance. As a result of topic modeling, 3 topics such as named ESG from the corporate perspective were derived for domestic papers, and a total of 7 topics such as named sustainable investment for overseas papers were derived. As a result of the annual trend analysis, each topic did not show a relatively increasing or decreasing tendency, confirming that all topics were neutral. Conclusions: The results of this study confirmed that although it is desirable that domestic papers have recently started research on consumers, the subject diversity is lower than that of overseas papers. Therefore, it is suggested that future research needs to approach various topics such as forecasting future risks related to ESG and corporate evaluation methods.