The University of Auckland SDG Keywords Mapping

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, adopted by all United Nations Member States, provides a blueprint for achieving a better future. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are a 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, including research, teaching, and community outreach. The University of Auckland was ranked first in the world in 2019 and again in 2020. To gain a better understanding of our research contribution, the University of Auckland SDG Keywords Dictionary Project seeks to build on the processes developed by the United Nations and THE in order to create an expanded list of keywords that can be used to identify SDG-relevant research.

Our intention is to help both our own researchers and those from other institutions, to better highlight their contributions to the SDGs.

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.