The Evolutionary Fronts of the Social and Environmental Accounting : A Bibliometric Visualization Profile

Social and Environmental Accounting(SEA), as a mainstream category distinguished from traditional accounting, not only contains the investigation of corporate environmental responsibility, but also refers to social responsibility and ethics, gradually having developed into principal realm under the background of biodiversity environmental issues, which has proved to be a major criterion of enterprise and government’s Environmental Performance(EP). This study aims to systematically sort and analyze the distribution of SEA research, its hot areas and evolution fronts. Utilizing “environment account” as the subject term, we apply CiteSpace and VOSviewer to retrieve 3679 records from papers in the collection of Web of Science Core (Wos) since 1975. To characterize the intellectual landscape by identifying and visualizing the publications, countries, institutions and categories of these papers, we compiled a map of keyword clusters, hotspots and emerging trends. The results revealed that publications about the SEA field have been increasing rapidly since 2010. The research appertaining to SEA is mainly in the scopes of environmental sciences & ecology, business & economics, engineering and green sustainable science & technology. Australia, The United States of America and The People's Republic of China (P. R. China) get more proportion of paper yield. Simultaneously, Sydney University, Australia Natl University and Shanghai Jiaotong University are in the top three of relevance ranking. Moreover, further research has brought to light that environmental disclosures, environmental performance, corporate social responsibility and sustainability will evolve into the new and popular directions and tendency in the SEA study