Ethical Climate: Exploring the Knowledge Base

The ethical climate concept has emerged as an influential paradigm in the 1990s, following the study of business ethics centered on corporate scandals. Extensive studies and reviews have been fueled by thirty years of knowledge accumulation. However, few bibliometric studies are conducted, and none focus on the knowledge base.Using bibliometric analyses, this study aims to investigate knowledge base for ethical climate from 1988 to 2022.Authors, journals, and documents were initially examined in terms of production, citation, and co-citation analyses using an integrated thematic approach.Next, the conceptual patterns through co-occurrence analyses and the structure of international collaboration were investigated. Bibliometric analyses show that the rapidly growing body of literature in the 2000s has shifted its focus to areas like sales and marketing and, particularly, the nursing environment.The study provides readers with a roadmap and recommendations for further study.