What are Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)?
Last updated on July 22, 2025
The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are specific research areas that are helping to solve real-world problems. They are part of a plan to end poverty, protect the planet, and improve the lives and prospects of everyone by 2030. The 15-year plan has 17 goals with 169 targets aimed at stimulating action in areas of critical importance to humanity and the environment.
Research in these areas can garner SDG labels, which draws attention to your work, provides you with a valuable reference when applying for funding, shows that your research is making a difference in the world, and raises awareness and understanding of this important framework created by the United Nations.
Sustainable Development Goals are mapped to a document by matching terms from a Scopus record against search queries, plus a predictive machine learning element, for each SDG. Terms (in English) in the article that are considered for mapping are from the record title, keywords, key descriptors, journal subject areas, and abstracts.
Elsevier data science teams designed the original queries as part of a request from Times Higher Education (THE) who asked for help in defining SDG search queries for use in their University Impact Rankings by SDGs. These original queries formed the starting point for several rounds of review and refinement, which included looking at the publications returned by the search queries in Scopus. The latest 2023 SDG queries are a result of Elsevier data science teams building extensive keyword queries, supplemented with a predictive machine learning element, to map documents to SDGs with very high precision. Times Higher Education (THE) are using the Elsevier 2023 SDG mapping as part of their 2023 Impact Rankings.
Details about the methodology, queries, and dataset are available on digital commons.
It can take up to 2 weeks for SDG labels to be assigned to articles that are new in Scopus. SDGs cannot be manually added to articles.
The Queries are a component part of the SDG classification process and therefore using them in isolation is not how to identify any content for an SDG.
We therefore do not support the execution of the queries in the Scopus “Advanced Search.
We are investigating how Scopus Search could offer a facility to filter on SDG’s.
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