The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, adopted by all United Nations Member States, provides a blueprint for building a better future. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) call for action to promote social and economic prosperity while protecting the planet.
The Times Higher Education (THE) University Impact Rankings measure the contribution of universities to the SDGs through research, teaching, and community engagement. The University of Auckland was ranked first in the world in 2019 and again in 2020. To better understand our research contributions, the University of Auckland SDG Keywords Dictionary Project builds on methodologies developed by the United Nations and THE to create an expanded list of keywords for identifying SDG-relevant research.
This ‘Auckland Approach’ represents the University’s effort to localise SDG mapping, reflecting activities unique to the University of Auckland, our Māori and Pacific communities, Aotearoa New Zealand, and the wider Pacific region. Our aim is to support researchers at UoA and beyond in better highlighting their contributions to the SDGs.
Within each SDG, you can explore the original ‘Auckland Approach’ results alongside updated keywords obtained from 2023 Elsevier query results. The outputs can be viewed separately: Auckalnd Approach, Elsevier keyword (using canonical forms) and the UoA-specific keywords.
Methodology
Text-mining techniques and methods have been applied to produce lists of SDG-related keywords from Elsevier’s Scopus database. The search query was based on Elsevier’s SDG search query, with additional search terms added from documentation provided by the Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN), and the UN itself. Scopus itself is one of the world’s largest abstract and citation databases and is used by THE to produce the University Impact Rankings.
We applied an n-gram model to mine the abstracts of academic publications, in order to identify relevant sequences of words. These n-gram tokens were then scored by a range of factors, including counts and measures of frequency, and were then ranked by those scores. Keywords with a high rank were then evaluated in more detail and manually reviewed to confirm that they were relevant to the Goal in question. Additionally, we also rank and assess both Author-provided and publication Index Keywords by their counts and frequencies.
Download Auckland Approach’s full list of keywords. As of June 2021 (all 16 SDGs).
Download a full list of Auckland Approach search queries for all SDGs.
Contact US
SDG Mapping Project — Point of Contact:
Daniel Robles Munoz
Sustainability Analyst
daniel.robles.munoz@auckland.ac.nz
Cite this work
Weiwei Wang, Weihao Kang, Jingwen Mu. Mapping research to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), 19 February 2023, PREPRINT (Version 2) available at Research Square [https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-2544385/v2]