Elsevier 2025 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) Mapping

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) challenge the global community to build a world where no one is left behind.

Since 2018, Elsevier has generated SDG search queries to help researchers and institutions track and demonstrate progress toward the SDG targets. In the past 3 years, these queries, along with the university’s own data and evidence supporting progress and contributions to the particular SDG outside of research-based metrics, are used for the THE Impact Rankings.

For 2025, the SDGs use the exact same search query and ML algorithm as the Elsevier 2023 SDG mappings (https://elsevier.digitalcommonsdata.com/datasets/y2zyy9vwzy/1), with only minor modifications coming from changes to the search engine handling the SDG queries. Because of this, while the vast majority of publications retain their original mapping, the number of publications in each SDG has slightly changed.

All these changes were implemented to streamline how SDG queries are handled. Users should note that running these in Scopus should be done for reference purposes only, as the Scopus search engine behaves slightly differently than the classifier used to formerly tag SDGs to publications.