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Sustainability indicators, measuring instruments that encompass financial, social and environmental issues, are very much used in organizational contexts, and because of that, most of the national and international scientific production on the subject is concentrated in measurement models application, resulting in descriptive and non-critical articles. Therefore, questions about the incidence of critical thinking in the literature on the subject arise. This work aims to describe and understand the main aspects of sustainability indicators and their applications in daily life of organizations; it also aims to map the critical studies on sustainability indicators in this field and to understand the authors' criticisms, as well as to understand the main the limitations of the sustainability indicators. It was was carried out a bibliometric study, followed by a selected articles content analysis, emerging four categories of wich many points were validated, through a qualitative survey with the analyzed publications authors. This bibliometric study was consisted by 57 articles analysis, written by 118 authors between 2002 and 2015, published in 26 international high impact journals. There is a predominance of qualitative methodologies in the field, especially content analysis. It presents as main authors names like Boiral, Fonseca, Milne and de Villiers. Vulnerabilities, positives issues, trends and applications, were four categories that emerged from literature that was confirmed via a survey realized with the main field authors. The survey connect the literature perceptions about a low number of published papers and the authors whose epistemological position is critical what demands a researchers reflection on an increase of critical studies elaboration. The qualitative survey with the authors of the articles reinforced the emerging perceptions throughout the analysis. The low incidence of studies with a critical approach indicate that the number of authors with this type of epistemological positioning is reduced; moreover, researchers have not always been reflecting on sustainability models and indicators to the point of criticizing them.