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

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

Since 2018, Elsevier have generated SDG search queries to help researchers and institutions track and demonstrate progress towards the targets of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). At the end of 2018, Elsevier worked on 2 versions of the SDG queries. One version was created by the Elsevier Analytical Services group and another by the Science-Metrix group, who had recently become part of Elsevier. At that time Science-Metrix was creating queries for 5 of the 16 SDGs, as part of pro-bono work for UNESCO.

In 2020 inspired by the earlier queries, Elsevier, through its Science-Metrix group, used a new approach to mapping publications to the SDGs. Taking customer feedback into account, they significantly increased the number of search terms used to define each SDG. Those queries were then complemented by a machine learning model, which helped increase the recall by approximately 10%.

As a result, this year’s “Elsevier 2021 SDG mapping” captures on average twice as many articles as the 2020 version, while keeping precision above 80%. The mapping also has a better overlap with SDG queries from other independent projects. Times Higher Education (THE) are using the “Elsevier 2021 SDG mapping” as part of their 2021 Impact Rankings.

The documentation below describes the methods used and shares the queries. For each SDG, you can download the query as a text file, along with an html file that describes the methodology used to create the search query, plus additional information such as the most influential keyphrases and journals. It also breaks down the query into digestable chunks. A separate folder contains the methodology for the machine learning component, along with a sample of the top 100 keyphrases per SDG and a stratified sample of 8,000 EIDs that the model identified arcoss the SDGs.

联合国可持续发展目标（SDGs）挑战全球社会构建一个不让任何一个人掉队的世界。自2018年起，Elsevier公司通过生成SDG搜索查询，旨在协助研究人员和机构追踪并展示联合国可持续发展目标（SDGs）目标的实现进展。在2018年底，Elsevier公司对SDG查询进行了两个版本的编制工作。其中一个版本由Elsevier分析服务团队创建，另一个版本则由Science-Metrix团队完成，该团队在此前已加入Elsevier。当时，Science-Metrix团队正为联合国教科文组织（UNESCO）提供无偿服务，为16个SDG中的5个编制查询。2020年，受早期查询的启发，Elsevier公司通过其Science-Metrix团队采用了一种新的方法，将出版物与SDGs进行映射。考虑到客户反馈，他们对每个SDG定义的搜索词数量进行了显著增加。随后，这些查询得到了一个机器学习模型的补充，该模型有助于提高召回率约10%。因此，今年的“Elsevier 2021 SDG映射”平均捕获的文章数量是2020年版本的两倍，同时保持了精确度超过80%。该映射与来自其他独立项目的SDG查询重叠度也更高。泰晤士高等教育（THE）将“Elsevier 2021 SDG映射”作为其2021年影响力排名的一部分。以下文档描述了所使用的方法，并分享了查询内容。对于每个SDG，您都可以下载查询作为文本文件，以及一个描述创建搜索查询所使用方法的html文件，以及包括最具影响力的关键词和期刊在内的附加信息。此外，该文档还将查询分解为可消化的部分。另一个文件夹包含了机器学习组件的方法，以及每个SDG前100个关键词的样本和模型在SDGs范围内识别的8,000个EIDs的分层样本。