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1. Introduction
Broadly defined, environmental accounting research examines how firms account for and discloses their environmental impacts as well as investigates the impact of environmental performance on firms’ performance [1]. There is now a substantial body of knowledge on accounting for firms' various environmental impacts, with a recent significant expansion of work particularly outside of core accounting journals. For example, several articles in the Journal of Business Ethics have examined the integration of environmental accounting into sustainability within a balanced scorecard framework (e.g. Hansen and Schaltegger, 2016). In journals which are marginal to the discipline of accounting, researchers have investigated topics including material flow cost (Schaltegger and Zvezdov, 2015) and carbon accounting (Burritt and Tingey-Holyoak, 2012) as well as environmental legitimacy, accountability and proactivity (Alrazi et al., 2015). Within the environmental sciences, there are publications on issues such as water (Burritt and Christ, 2017) and carbon accounting in the contexts of forests, cities and national carbon accounts (Carlson et al., 2013; Chen et al., 2019; Kander et al., 2015; Steininger et al., 2016). The question of how firms should account for environmental impacts is also being studied in fields as diverse as energy policy, economics and environmental sciences.
Here, we demonstrate the application of a machine learning method for literature reviews by showing how it can be used to track topic trends in the rapidly growing body of environmental accounting research and apply this method to review research studies in the field of environmental accounting published both within and outside of accounting journals. [2] Our research method, which is described further in detail in the article, is a machine learning approach that tracks “topic bursts” within each body of the literature to track topic evolution and new topic trends within that body of the literature. Extant reviews on environmental accounting have provided highly useful insights into the evolution of environmental accounting within a particular journal (Deegan, 2017) or a particular range of journals (e.g. Chung and Cho, 2018; Deegan and Soltys, 2007; Gibassier et al., 2020; Laine et al., 2020; Parker, 2011). However, these analyses do not necessarily review a broader, interdisciplinary range of articles to answer calls for greater interdisciplinary efforts (e.g. Bebbington et al., 2017;...