The Trends and Content of Research Related to the Sustainable Development Goals: A Systemic Review

Abstract

This study employed a comprehensive systematic review of the literature (SRL) process with the Content Analysis Toolkits for Academic Research (CATAR) for conducting a bibliometric analysis of the 2814 general SDG-related papers and 92 review papers selected from the Web of Science database from 2013 to 2022. The overview analysis found that the US and UK took the lead in publication and citation. The WHO and several universities were identified as the most prominent institutes around the globe. The field distribution of the most cited papers revealed the existence of a “strong sustainability” paradigm and the importance of science and technology. A landscape of 1123 papers was included in eight clusters according to the bibliographic coupling algorithms in the Multi-stage Document Clustering (MSDC) process. These clusters were then categorized into three groups, “synergies and trade-offs”, “networking”, and “systems analysis”, demonstrated in the theme maps. As for the 92 SDG-related review papers, most were shaped based on literature analysis without specified countries. Moreover, SDG 3 was identified as that exclusively studied in most papers. The information presented is expected to help research scholars, public sectors, and practitioners monitor, gather, check, analyze, and use the growing volume of SDG-related academic articles.

Sustainable development goals: a bibliometric analysis of literature reviews

“…Thus, it is noted that even though the total number of documents, TC, h-index, and IF indicate that SDG 3 is among the top 3 most relevant sources, the normalized citation data indicate that journals research on energy, multidisciplinary and general environmental sciences, and sustainability are among the most noticeable sources. It is important to highlight that this result is contrary to that obtained in bibliometric studies reported previously (Meschede 2020 ; Yeh et al 2022 ). This indicates that the number of citations alone is not adequate to assess the relevance of a document or journal (Simko 2015 ).…”

“…Although many bibliometric studies have been found in the field of SDGs research, most of them focus on specific disciplines, such as SDG and the business sector (Pizzi et al 2020), education (Prieto-Jiménez et al 2021, poverty (Yu and Huang 2021), and few bibliometric studies cover the SDG general aspects and its evolution. Nevertheless, some interesting bibliometric studies of SDG trends are worth mentioning, such as the study of Díaz-López et al (2021), Meschede (2020), Yeh et al (2022), andSianes et al (2022). All of them included a large number of documents (thousands) and do none of them focused on literature review articles.…”

“…Previous bibliometric studies have reported that research related to the SDGs is focused mainly on health (SDG 3), climate change (SDG 13), food (SDG 2), energy (SDG7), and sanitation (SDG 6) (Meschede 2020;Belmonte-Ureña et al 2021;Yeh et al 2022;Londoño-Pineda and Cano 2022;Sianes et al 2022). Controversially, the present research found that academic research on SDGs 8, 9, 11, which was considered poorly researched and lacking in consolidated literature (Pizzi et al 2020), obtained greater evidence, despite the number of occurrences and citations that can lead to an erroneous conclusion.…”

Implementation of the SDGs by social economy enterprises in the agrifood sector

“…The implementation of SDGs in the food industry to achieve sustainable change and improve social and environmental well-being has been the subject of research (Yeh et al ., 2022). Green knowledge management strengthens organisational capabilities for firms to achieve green innovation (Wong et al ., 2022) and the SDGs (Wang et al ., 2022).…”

Comunicar para tomar decisiones: ¿qué nos está faltando?

“…El número de publicaciones científicas sigue en aumento; las temáticas de interés mundial como la sostenibilidad no son la excepción entre los temas tratados. Como ejemplo, los documentos que abordan los Objetivos de Desarrollo Sostenible (en la base de datos Web of Science) pasó de siete a 774 entre los años 2013 y 2021 (Yeh et al, 2022). Todo ello es solo una pequeña muestra del esfuerzo de la comunidad científica por dar a conocer sus hallazgos y relacionarlos con temáticas de interés público.…”