The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs) are a global initiative to address humanity's most urgent challenges.
Launched in September 2015, the SDGs lay out a bold vision for tackling critical economic, social, and environmental issues by 2030. These 17 goals provide a blueprint for collaboration among nations, organisations, and individuals to create a fairer, more prosperous, and sustainable world.
In recent years, the SDGs have also become a key tool for reporting progress toward sustainability. Since 2019, the Times Higher Education Impact Rankings have encouraged universities to highlight their contributions to the SDGs, underscoring the role of research in achieving global goals. Learn more about the SDGs and the 2030 agenda here.
Flinders University has aligned its own Sustainability Strategy with the UN’s SDG framework. Through ResearchNow, we highlight how our research contributes to these global goals. Research outputs harvested from Scopus are tagged with relevant SDGs, which are displayed on both outputs and individual researcher profiles. Each College also has a consolidated view of its SDG-aligned research on the Research @ Flinders public portal.
How it works
Since early 2022, Scopus has used algorithms to automatically assign SDGs to research outputs based on keywords in titles, abstracts, and content. In late 2023, Flinders University enabled functionality to bring this data into ResearchNow.
When a research output is claimed through Scopus, any associated SDGs are automatically applied to the output in ResearchNow. These SDGs are visible on both the output and the researcher’s Research @ Flinders public profile.
Showcasing Real-World Impact:
Fostering Collaboration:
Accessing New Funding Opportunities:
Enhancing Visibility and Recognition:
Publications imported from Scopus into ResearchNow will display SDGs assigned by Scopus. Scopus uses text-mining algorithms to tag publications with relevant SDGs by analysing content such as the title, abstract, keywords, and sometimes even the full text. This process identifies keywords, themes, and phrases that align with specific SDGs, linking research across various fields to both direct and indirect SDG contributions. Once an output is claimed, validated, and published on the Research @Flinders portal, the associated SDG(s) are displayed alongside the publication, reflecting how your research is categorised in the broader academic community. Starting in early 2025, SDGs will also be shown on researcher profiles, as well as College, Research Centre, or Institute pages, with options for further curation.
Instructions on how to curate SDGs on your public Research@Flinders can be found here.
SDGs assigned through Scopus algorithms cannot be altered within ResearchNow. However, if you have concerns about an assigned SDG, submit a ServiceOne request to the Library for assistance. Researchers can also attend the Your Research and the UN's Sustainable Development Goals course. This course provides guidance on improving abstracts to help Scopus algorithms assign the most relevant SDGs.
For consistency, we discourage manually assigning SDGs to outputs, as this could conflict with industry-wide classifications. Curation of SDGs is best done within your own personal profile.
SciVal is an analytical benchmarking tool that represents the external Scopus data source. In SciVal, SDGs are identified using a similar method to Scopus, involving automated text-mining algorithms. These algorithms analyse the content of research outputs, including titles, abstracts, keywords, and other metadata, to identify themes, keywords, and phrases that align with specific SDGs.
SciVal provides users with the ability to explore and assess research activity in relation to the SDGs, offering insights into which areas of research are contributing to sustainable development. This data is used in the Times Higher Education (THE) rankings. In SciVal there are 3 sets of SDGs:
SciVal have worked with a set of university partners to improve the mappings, with their input used to create and improve the 2022 and 2023 search queries. See detailed FAQs here.
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