Improving the Scopus and Aurora queries to identify research that supports the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 2021

Rivest, Maxime; Kashnitsky, Yury; Bédard-Vallée, Alexandre; Campbell, David; Khayat, Paul S.; Labrosse, Isabelle; Pinheiro, Henrique; Provençal, Simon; Roberge, Guillaume; James, Chris

doi:10.17632/9sxdykm8s4.4

Cited by 8 publications

(7 citation statements)

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“…Expanding on previous studies that investigated gender in research from a topical perspective using the Scopus database [17], we have developed a keyword search-based approach to identify publications that explicitly include terms related to sex and/or gender topical research in the title, abstract or keywords. These publications are matched to the corpus of publications reflecting research related to each of 16 SDGs (excluding SDG 17: Partnership for the Goals) that have been defined on the basis of expert-informed Scopus keyword searches augmented with machine learning [18].…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Sustainability through a gender lens: The extent to which research on UN Sustainable Development Goals includes sex and gender consideration

Herbert

Falk-Krzesinski²,

James³

et al. 2022

PLoS ONE

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Through efforts of the Gender Summits and UN Women, it is evident that all United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) targets must be viewed from a gender perspective to ensure that the outcomes benefit women and men equally. Our research focuses on the extent to which sex and gender topics are explicitly covered in research related to the SDGs. Expanding on previous studies, we have developed an approach to detect and visualize the volume and proportion of research publications that include explicit mention of sex and gender terms. The approach visualizes the topical coverage of the publications in the corpus of each SDG as a term map, and overlays that view with the proportion of the publications associated with sex and gender topics. We show that attention to sex and gender topics is uneven across the SDGs, and that even where overlap between an SDG and consideration of sex and gender is high, significant topical areas of relevance to the SDG have little explicit connection with sex and gender. This study lays the groundwork for the evidence-based development of a roadmap toward greater integration of sex and gender across all SDGs as well as monitoring integration progress over time.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For each of the 16 SDGs included in this study, a corpus consisting of the publications identified by queries described recently [18] was created from an analytical copy of the Scopus dataset accessed via ICSR Lab [21], snapshot dated June 1 st 2021. This delivered a unique publication set for each of the 16 SDGs.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sustainability through a gender lens: The extent to which research on UN Sustainable Development Goals includes sex and gender consideration

Herbert

Falk-Krzesinski²,

James³

et al. 2022

PLoS ONE

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“…Monash University [34] 915 SDG 1-17 1 Elsevier [31] 1600 SDG 1-16 EU Mapper [45] 3382 SDG 1-17 (& targets) SIRIS Academic [42] 3693 SDG 1-16 University of Auckland [43] 2897 SDG 1-16…”

Section: Keyword List Source Number Of Abstract Sdgs Coveredmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…There has been more progress in measuring the level to which SDGs are embedded in research. A machine-learned approach was used by Elsevier in the "Mapping Research Output to the SDGs" initiative [29][30][31]. These models use handpicked research publications that relate to an SDG to create a "golden set" for the machine-learning methodology.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Education for Sustainable Development: Mapping the SDGs to University Curricula

2023

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Education for sustainable development (ESD) is a growing research field, particularly over the last decade. Measuring the level of ESD that is currently embedded in curricula is useful for planning the further implementation of sustainability-related teaching. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are a useful benchmark for sustainability topics and so this paper follows a methodology in which a keyword scanning tool was created to quantify the level of SDG coverage within a list of learning outcomes for a module. The aim of the research is to further develop this methodology and compare the results from the keyword tool with results from a survey of the academic staff who deliver the modules. SDG-related keyword lists were collected from multiple sources for a meta-analysis, examining the performance of various lists. These lists were then compiled into one list of over 12,000 SDG keywords and a team of reviewers conducted a critical analysis on the relevancy of the context in which the keywords were found when scanned. This process reduced the list to 222 “crucial keywords” and gave the keywords a relevancy label based on the STARS definitions, the sustainability tracking assessment and rating system. Finally, ChatGPT was also investigated as a method of enriching the critically analysed list with contextually relevant synonyms. A survey was carried out within the College of Science and Engineering at the University of Galway. It asked staff to rate the level of SDG coverage within their own modules, in their own opinion. This gave results which could be compared with the keyword scanning tool. The findings show success in improving the accuracy of the SDG keywords. ChatGPT added synonyms to the crucial keywords identified and this list was the most accurate out of all keyword lists used in the study. Using these keywords and the modules that staff rated in the survey, a correlation was found in the SDG trend.

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“…Since 2018, Elsevier has generated structure query language (SQL) searches to help universities track their research contributions to the SDGs. They have been subsequently enhanced by machine learning in 2020 (Rivest et al, 2021). The same approach could apply to identifying modules aligned to the SDGs, the main contextual difference being that module/course descriptors are typically brief summaries of the expected learning outcomes and the associated learning activities, including assessment strategies, hence are typically much shorter than research papers.…”

Section: Text Based Approachesmentioning

confidence: 99%

A computational approach to evaluating curricular alignment to the united nations sustainable development goals

et al. 2022

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The United Nations (UN) considers universities to be key actors in the pursuit of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Yet, efforts to evaluate the embeddedness of the SDGs in university curricula tend to rely on manual analyses of curriculum documents for keywords contained in sustainability lexica, with little consideration for the diverse contexts of such keywords. The efficacy of these efforts, relying on expert co-elicitation in both subject-matter contexts and sustainability, suffers from drawbacks associated with keyword searches, such as limited coverage of key concepts, difficulty in extracting intended meaning and potential for greenwashing through “keyword stuffing.” This paper presents a computational technique, derived from natural language processing (NLP), which develops a sustainability lexicon of root keywords (RKs) of relative importance by adapting the Term Frequency–Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) method to a corpus of sustainability documents. Identifying these RKs in module/course descriptors offers a basis for evaluating the embeddedness of sustainability in 5,773 modules in a university's curricula using classification criteria provided by the Association for the Enhancement of Sustainability in Higher Education's (AASHE). Applying this technique, our analysis of these descriptors found 286 modules (5%) to be “sustainability focused” and a further 769 modules (13%) to be “sustainability inclusive,” which appear to address SDGs 1, 17, 3, 7, and 15. Whilst this technique does not exploit machine learning methods applied to large amounts of trained data, it is, nevertheless, systemic and evolutive. It, therefore, offers an appropriate trade-off, which faculty with limited analytics skills can apply. By supplementing existing approaches to evaluating sustainability in the curriculum, the developed technique offers a contribution to benchmarking curricular alignment to the SDGs, facilitating faculty to pursue meaningful curricular enhancement, whilst complying with sustainability reporting requirements. The technique is useful for first-pass analyses of any university curriculum portfolio. Further testing and validation offer an avenue for future design-science research.

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Improving the Scopus and Aurora queries to identify research that supports the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 2021

Cited by 8 publications

References 0 publications

Sustainability through a gender lens: The extent to which research on UN Sustainable Development Goals includes sex and gender consideration

Sustainability through a gender lens: The extent to which research on UN Sustainable Development Goals includes sex and gender consideration

Education for Sustainable Development: Mapping the SDGs to University Curricula

A computational approach to evaluating curricular alignment to the united nations sustainable development goals

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