How HKUST Research Contributes to Sustainable Development Goals

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HKUST Research

The United Nations set 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. HKUST researchers can contribute a lot to these goals. Can you guess which SDGs our research relates to the most?

The UN SDGs

The 17 SDGs are high-level goals that are meant to be an urgent call for action. These global challenges are heavily interlinked; they require global effort and partnership to tackle.

Mapping Research Publications to SDGs in Scopus

Research in all disciplines can contribute to SDGs in different ways. Researchers and institutions over the world work hard towards these goals, and also try hard to demonstrate how their effort helps to reach SDGs. Currently, when researchers publish their works in journals, there is no practice to tag which SDGs their research may support. However, in the database Scopus, there are now pre-defined sets of keywords that attempt to map research output to SDGs 1 to 16.

We used Scopus to capture how many HKUST-affiliated papers matched these SDG keywords. This post highlights the results.

Number of HKUST Publications

*The searches were conducted on September 7, 2021

SDGs	No. of HKUST Publications from 2015 onwards
01 No Poverty	11
02 Zero Hunger	34
03 Good Health and Well-being	1357
04 Quality Education	11
05 Gender equality	19
06 Clean water and sanitation	93
07 Affordable and clean energy	1006
08 Decent work and economic growth	108
09 Industry, innovation, and infrastructure	112
10 Reduced inequalities	35
11 Sustainable cities and communities	371
12 Responsible consumption and production	152
13 Climate action	216
14 Life below water	207
15 Life on land	80
16 Peace, justice, and strong institution	68
Total	3880

Most of our papers are in SDG 03 Good Health and Well-being and SDG 07 Affordable and clean energy. The distribution is clearer when we put the same data into Figure 1, showing that three SDGs 03, 07 and 11 being the biggest portions:

Figure 1

HKUST Impact Areas Relative to the Global Publishing Profile

While the major portions of HKUST research output fall into the two areas: health science and energy research, it might be because these areas represent a high proportion of global research. When we compare the distribution of HKUST papers and the global picture (Figure 2), in fact we have relatively higher number of publications in these eight SDGs:

Figure 2

Other Ways to Connect Research Output to SDGs

Dimensions SDG-related topic searches — *Figure 3*

Scopus uses a keywords mapping approach to identify papers related to SDGs. It is a simple idea, yet it is debatable whether it is effective or meaningful. Apart from Scopus, Dimensions also set up SDG-related topic searches, you can find them among the filters options (Figure 3).

You can find out more about these methods and research around SDGs in general from these reports and projects:

Contextualizing Sustainable Development Research by Digital Science
The Power of Data to Advance the SDGs by Elsevier
SDG relevancy mapping, a project by SpringerNature and universities in the Netherlands
Consensus and dissensus in ‘mappings’ of science for Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), a study at Leiden University

The Scopus searches reported in this post were conducted by Lester Chan from the Library's Research Support Services team. If you are interested about the data such as publication details, productive authors among the results, citation counts, etc., you can contact Lester.

Edited By

Gabi Wong, Library, lbgabi@ust.hk

Published

29 Sep 2021