Digital HRM and Sustainability-Oriented HRM: A Parallel Bibliometric Comparison Across OpenAlex and Scopus (2012–2025)

Digitalisation and sustainability reporting exert parallel pressures on human resource management (HRM); yet, whether their research streams overlap is more often assumed than measured. This study measures that overlap directly. Treating digital HRM and sustainability/ESG-oriented HRM as two prespecified, query-defined streams, it compares them across OpenAlex and Scopus (2012–2025) through separate conceptual blocks, their union and direct AND intersection, title–abstract–keyword retrieval, deterministic quality control, directed cross-citation, DOI matching, and sensitivity analyses. The analytical unions comprise 13,764 OpenAlex and 5128 Scopus records, but their direct intersections contain only 284 and 89 (Jaccard 2.06% and 1.74%), a result reproduced by a stricter 4047-record Scopus corpus (1.93%). Citation crosses the two streams asymmetrically, flowing more often from digital HRM toward sustainability than in reverse. Across 3395 DOI-matched records, the databases rank journals, authors, and countries almost identically (0.95, 0.89, and 0.97), yet their coupling communities align only moderately (adjusted Rand index 0.37; normalised mutual information 0.57). ESG surfaces within the keyword network rather than disappearing from it. The streams are therefore integrating, but partially, asymmetrically, and to a degree that shifts with database, metadata, vocabulary, and network choices. The study contributes a reproducible protocol that measures such integration rather than presuming it.