CSR research has a conceptual core and an empirical core. Conceptually, read Carroll (1991) for the pyramid, Carroll (1999) for the history of the definition, Dahlsrud (2008) on 37 definitions, and Garriga and Melé (2004) for a map of theories. Empirically, the most-cited question is whether CSR pays: McWilliams and Siegel (2000, 2001) on financial performance and Cheng, Ioannou and Serafeim (2014) on access to finance.
How the literature is organised
In OpenAlex, titles on CSR peaked in 2019 at about 3,750 and have stayed between 3,300 and 3,700 a year since. Archie Carroll wrote three of the ten most-cited papers: the 1991 pyramid, the 1999 history of the definitional construct and, with Shabana, the 2010 review of the business case. Around these are attempts to bring order. Garriga and Melé (2004) map the territory of CSR theories, and Dahlsrud (2008) develops five dimensions of CSR from a content analysis of 37 definitions.
Explanatory theory comes from two directions. McWilliams and Siegel (2001) give a theory-of-the-firm account, a supply and demand model in which there is an ideal level of CSR that managers can determine by cost-benefit analysis. Campbell (2007) gives an institutional account of when corporations behave responsibly.
The empirical core tests consequences. Beyond financial performance, accounting and finance scholars study disclosure (Dhaliwal et al., 2011) and access to finance (Cheng, Ioannou and Serafeim, 2014).
Main debates
Does it pay? McWilliams and Siegel (2000, 2001) argue for a neutral relationship with financial performance, while Cheng, Ioannou and Serafeim (2014) and Dhaliwal et al. (2011) find benefits through access to finance and the cost of equity. Carroll and Shabana (2010) review the business case, which asks what firms get out of it, and Velte (2022) reviews the meta-analyses. A second debate is conceptual: Dmytriyev, Freeman and Hörisch (2021) address what they call a limited and often misleading understanding of the relationship between CSR and stakeholder theory.
Where recent work is heading
Recent citations cluster around sustainability. Fallah Shayan et al. (2022) propose the Sustainable Development Goals as a framework for CSR, and several papers tie CSR to green innovation and environmental performance (Yuan and Cao, 2022; Le, 2022). Implementation has its own review and research agenda (Fatima and Elbanna, 2023), and there are sector and ownership-specific syntheses for family firms and tourism. Meseguer-Sánchez et al. (2021) is a bibliometric analysis of how CSR and sustainability research interrelate.
Most-cited foundational papers
Published before 2021 and ranked by how often later work cites them. Read the abstract of each and the full text of the three or four closest to your question. Citation count measures attention, not quality, so treat this as a map of what the field has argued about rather than a ranking of what is true.
Abagail McWilliams, Donald Siegel (2000). Strategic Management Journal.
Cited by 3,611doi:10.1002/(sici)1097-0266(200005)21:5<603::aid-smj101>3.0.co;2-3
Most-cited papers since 2021
Primary studies and conceptual papers from 2021 onwards. A paper published in 2024 has had a few years to accumulate citations where the works in the section above have had decades, so compare these counts with each other rather than with the ones above.
Yannik Bofinger, Kim J. Heyden, Björn Rock (2022). Journal of Banking & Finance.
Cited by 295doi:10.1016/j.jbankfin.2021.106322
Recent reviews and meta-analyses
The fastest way into a literature. A good review gives you the structure of the field, a reference list to mine and, in its limitations section, the gaps other researchers have already spotted.
Arun Madanaguli and 3 others (2022). Sustainable Development.
Cited by 150Open accessdoi:10.1002/sd.2258
How big the literature is, and where it is published
OpenAlex indexes 57,621 works whose title matches this topic. The chart shows how many were published each year from 2000 to 2025; the current year is left out because it is incomplete.
Show the numbers as a table
Year
Works
2000
41
2001
68
2002
97
2003
144
2004
314
2005
377
2006
573
2007
707
2008
1,009
2009
1,226
2010
1,360
2011
1,830
2012
2,170
2013
2,385
2014
2,703
2015
3,011
2016
3,213
2017
3,457
2018
3,659
2019
3,751
2020
3,680
2021
3,356
2022
3,326
2023
3,523
2024
3,672
2025
3,631
Journals behind the most-cited work
Counted across the 380 most-cited works on the topic, not across everything published. Browsing recent issues of the first two or three is a reliable way to find current work that has not yet been cited much.
Journal of Business Ethics61 papers
Journal of Cleaner Production20 papers
Corporate Social Responsibility and Environmental Management19 papers
Sustainability13 papers
Journal of Business Research9 papers
Strategic Management Journal9 papers
Academy of Management Journal8 papers
Journal of Management Studies8 papers
Search strings to copy
Written for databases that accept Boolean operators (Scopus, Web of Science, ERIC, PubMed, EBSCO). Quotation marks keep a phrase together, an asterisk stands in for the end of a word, and OR groups go in brackets. British and American spellings are written out with OR rather than covered by a single-character wildcard, because those wildcards differ between databases: PubMed’s help page documents the asterisk only, and asks for at least four characters before it. Limit the search to title and abstract first; widen it only if you get too little. Our guide to starting a literature review covers how to record what you searched.
CSR and financial performance
("corporate social responsibility" OR CSR OR ESG) AND ("financial performance" OR "firm value" OR "cost of capital" OR profitability)
CSR and employees or consumers
("corporate social responsibility" OR CSR) AND (employee* OR consumer* OR customer*) AND (commitment OR loyalty OR trust OR "purchase intention")
CSR in emerging economies
("corporate social responsibility" OR CSR) AND ("developing countr*" OR "emerging econom*" OR India OR Brazil OR Turkey OR Philippines)
Explore corporate social responsibility in Wonders →Opens Wonders on this question. Once you are signed in it becomes a project with suggested sub-topics and keywords you can edit before searching. The trial is 14 days.
Sub-topics to narrow into
A thesis-sized question usually sits inside one of these, combined with a population or a setting.
Definitions and theory
Carroll (1991, 1999), Dahlsrud (2008), Garriga and Melé (2004) and the institutional theory of Campbell (2007).
The business case
Carroll and Shabana (2010) review the arguments; Velte (2022) reviews the meta-analyses.
Disclosure and capital markets
Dhaliwal et al. (2011) on voluntary CSR reporting and the cost of equity capital.
CSR and stakeholder theory
Dmytriyev, Freeman and Hörisch (2021) compare the two frameworks.
Every paper above has a DOI, a part of the reference that is easy to leave out. Here is one of them, “The pyramid of corporate social responsibility: Toward the moral management of organizational stakeholders” (1991), in the two styles students ask about most:
APA 7th edition
Carroll, A. B. (1991). The pyramid of corporate social responsibility: Toward the moral management of organizational stakeholders. Business Horizons, 34(4), 39–48. https://doi.org/10.1016/0007-6813(91)90005-g
MLA 9th edition
Carroll, Archie B. “The Pyramid of Corporate Social Responsibility: Toward the Moral Management of Organizational Stakeholders.” Business Horizons, vol. 34, no. 4, 1991, pp. 39–48, https://doi.org/10.1016/0007-6813(91)90005-g.
Check the details against the article itself before you submit: databases, including the one behind this page, sometimes carry the online-first year rather than the volume year. Full rules and more examples are in our guides to APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard, Vancouver and ABNT, with the rest in the citation guides. You can also format a reference from its DOI with our free citation tools.
Frequently asked questions
What is Carroll's pyramid of CSR?
It is the model of a firm's responsibilities that Carroll (1991) presents in Business Horizons, the most-cited work on this page. Read and cite the original for the layers of the pyramid instead of a textbook summary. Carroll (1999) traces how definitions of CSR evolved from the 1950s, and Carroll (2021) revisits the construct's development and future.
Does CSR improve financial performance?
It is contested. McWilliams and Siegel (2000) argued that models omitting R&D investment give upwardly biased estimates, and found a neutral effect once R&D was controlled for. Later work finds benefits through specific channels such as lower capital constraints (Cheng, Ioannou and Serafeim, 2014) and lower cost of equity for good performers that report (Dhaliwal et al., 2011). Velte (2022) reviews the meta-analyses.
What is the difference between CSR and ESG?
ESG stands for environmental, social and governance. The papers on this page are about CSR, but finance papers such as Bofinger, Heyden and Rock (2022) bring ESG measures into CSR research, as their title shows. In your own work, be explicit about which term you mean and which data provider you use.
How this page was made
The lists come from OpenAlex, an open index of scholarly works whose data are published under a CC0 licence, queried on September 21, 2026 for works whose title matches "corporate social responsibility". Only works with a DOI are listed. Each one was checked against the publisher’s own record at Crossref or DataCite (title, year, first author, journal, volume and pages), and in three cases, where the publisher deposited no byline, against PubMed; anything OpenAlex or Crossref flags as retracted was left out, and an editor took out results that matched the words but not the subject. Citation counts are OpenAlex’s on that date and are usually lower than Google Scholar’s, which counts more kinds of document. Ranking by citations tells you what a field has relied on, not what is correct; several heavily cited papers on any topic are cited because later work disputes them. Books without a DOI are missing, which matters in fields where the founding text is a book.
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