New research trends in sustainability in family businesses : a bibliometric literature review

Sustainability in family businesses is becoming an exigent, interesting, and ever-evolving topic in the field of business research, owing to the requirements of sustainable development agendas for all types of companies. The growing body of research on this topic, considering traditional and new challenges for family firms, encourages the synthesis and organization of existing knowledge through a literature review. This study conducts a combination of different analyses with bibliometric techniques to provide an overview of the evolution of scientific literature on sustainability in family businesses and its structure in terms of relevant groups of researchers, most cited articles, and the contributing journals. Finally, future research endeavors are suggested for each identified open theme. Unlike previous reviews, the present work considered emergent sub-fields such as environmental studies and environmental sciences in document selection, which have been incorporated into the traditional research fields like business, management, and economics and finance in the context of family businesses.