Considering the swift adoption of innovative sustainability practices in businesses to accomplish sustainable development goals (SDGs), research on corporate sustainability has increased significantly over the years. This research intends to analyze the published literature, emphasizing the existing, emerging and future research directions on achieving the SDGs through corporate sustainability.

This research analyzed the growing trends in corporate sustainability by incorporating 2,038 Scopus articles published between 1999 and 2022 using latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) topic modeling, bibliometrics and qualitative content analysis techniques. The bibliometric data were analyzed using performance and science mapping. Thereafter, topic modeling and content analysis uncovered the topics included under the corporate sustainability umbrella.

The findings indicate that investigation into corporate sustainability has considerably increased from 2015 to date. Additionally, the majority of studies on corporate sustainability are from the United States of America, the United Kingdom and Germany. Besides, the USA has the most collaboration in terms of co-authorship. S. Schaltegger was considered the most productive author. However, P. Bansal was ranked as the top author based on a co-citation analysis of authors. Further, bibliometric data were evaluated to analyze leading publications, journals and institutions. Besides, keyword co-occurrence analysis, topic modeling and content analysis highlighted the theoretical underpinnings and new patterns and provided directions for further research.

This study demonstrates various existing and emerging themes in corporate sustainability, which have various repercussions for academicians and organizations. This research also examines the lagging themes in the current domain.