Mapping publications to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are specific research areas that help solve real-world problems. They are part of a plan to end poverty, protect the planet, and improve the lives and prospects of everyone by 2030. The 15-year plan has 17 goals with 169 targets aimed at stimulating action in areas of critical importance to humanity and the environment.

The 17 Sustainable Development Goals can be categorized into 5 Ps to better assess all goals:

Research in these areas can earn an SDG designation, which provides a valuable reference when applying for funding, shows that your research is having an impact on the world, and increases awareness and understanding of this important framework created by the UN.

In addition, by assigning your publication to at least one of the SDG goals, you gain in the process of allocating Publication Bonuses, which are awarded regularly at Gdańsk Tech.

Gdansk University of Technology, in turn, gains additional points in the rankings: Times Higher Education (THE Impact), QS Sustainability Ranking and Perspectives.

Since 2018, Elsevier has been developing a set of queries related to the Sustainable Development Goals to help researchers and institutions track and demonstrate progress toward the SDGs. Expanding its map of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the company has published an updated 2023 list of keywords, in which she calculated a “TF-IDF” score for each of them. The TF-IDF score indicates the relevance of a given keyword for a specific SDG goal. Elsevier thus provided a table showing the set of 1,000 keywords most closely related to each SDG goal.

Details of the methodology and mapping can be found in - Elsevier 2023 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) Mapping.

The Sustainable Development Goals are mapped to an article by matching used wording/terms from a publication found in the Scopus database to search queries for each SDG. The terms (in English) in the article considered for mapping come from the publication title, keywords, key descriptors, journal subject areas and abstracts.
It can take up to 2 weeks to assign SDG labels to articles that are new to Scopus. SDGs cannot be added manually to articles.
Very simply, go to Scopus.com, search for your author profile (e.g., by entering your last name and first name). Once the author's profile is displayed, go to the “Impact” tab, where the number of publications attributed to each Sustainable Development Goal is presented.

Below, you will find a set of the 100 most relevant keywords for each SDG.
We encourage you to familiarize yourself with them and use them appropriately in your research work, so that they will be more visible to the world and to those interested in a particular research area related to the topic of the Sustainable Development Goals.