oai:eurokd.com:article/418 2025-12-15

Trends in Attention to the 17 Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations <p style="text-align:justify;">In 2015 the United&nbsp;Nations put forth 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). These are intended&nbsp;to be largely achieved by 2030. The Sustainable Development Goals are a larger&nbsp;follow-up to the United Nations’ Millennial Development Goals (MDGs), agreed to&nbsp;2000, which were the first attempt by the UN to create metrics for improving&nbsp;societies that were to be used across the world (From MDGs to SDGs, n.d.). This&nbsp;study is on trends in attention to the SDGs, as indicated by trends in the&nbsp;production of academic articles on the topical areas of each of the 17 SDGs.&nbsp;Research related to the Sustainable Development Goals is important to see what is being prioritized and what needs to get more focus (Fayomi, 2018). The&nbsp;sub-goals of the SDGs are called “indicators.”&nbsp;&nbsp;Key topics and terms of the SDGs and their indicators can be used in&nbsp;searching Google Scholar year by year to ascertain cardinal and ordinal&nbsp;measures of trends in article publication related to the SDGs. This is based on&nbsp;the premise that attention to a particular SDG in academic literature is a&nbsp;valid indicator related to action by nations, businesses, and not-for-profit&nbsp;organizations on the SDGs. This research aims to investigate changes in the&nbsp;relative attention paid to SDGs by academics as indicated in the absolute and&nbsp;relative numbers of articles produced over the period 2010-2020 as indicated by&nbsp;their listing, year by year, in the Google Scholar database. Key terms were&nbsp;extracted from the sub-goals of the SDGs and utilized as search terms. Two&nbsp;search terms were used for each SDG, ad based on the data, we then focused in&nbsp;on the most relevant one for each SDG to examine in comparison with the others.&nbsp;We compare the located continuities, changes in a relative number of items&nbsp;produced (change in ranking) over this time frame. Theories that might be&nbsp;tested in future research on the source of change in the relative ranking of&nbsp;the SDGs are put forth.</p> EuroKD Publishing 2020-08-24 Text https://api.eurokd.com/Uploads/Article/418/mbrq.2020.14.03.pdf https://doi.org/10.32038/mbrq.2020.14.03 en Pages 35–46