Corporate social responsibility (CSR) and stakeholder engagement have developed through increasingly interconnected literatures on governance, legitimacy, participation, sustainability, and organizational accountability. Yet the conceptual proximity of these domains can obscure important differences between stakeholder representation, substantive participation, deliberative quality, legitimacy, disclosure, and organizational outcomes. This bibliometric review examines the evolution of CSR and stakeholder-engagement research between 2017 and 2024 while maintaining those distinctions. The review combines performance-oriented bibliometric logic with intellectual-structure, conceptual-structure, and thematic-evolution perspectives, complemented by evidence-bounded interpretation of governance and participation scholarship. The analysis is organized to distinguish publication and citation visibility from research quality, co-citation proximity from theoretical agreement, and keyword co-occurrence from evidence of causal mechanisms. The interpretive synthesis indicates an increasingly differentiated research agenda in which conventional CSR and stakeholder-management concerns coexist with scholarship on deliberation, contestation, power asymmetry, marginalization, digital engagement, political context, and multi-stakeholder legitimacy. The principal contribution is a proposed integrative interpretation in which governance arrangements, participation processes, and legitimacy assessments constitute connected but non-equivalent dimensions of the evolving field. This framing avoids treating engagement itself as proof of democratic inclusion, legitimate governance, or effective CSR. The review also identifies methodological boundaries arising from database coverage, metadata standardization, citation-age effects, network thresholds, and researcher-mediated cluster interpretation. These boundaries constrain causal, evaluative, and cross-context conclusions and define priorities for subsequent longitudinal, multilevel, and comparative research.
