The Elsevier SDG Research Mapping Initiative is an open-access data and research framework developed by Elsevier in partnership with global academic institutions, including the University of Southern Denmark, the Aurora Universities Network, and the University of Auckland. The initiative is designed to help universities, researchers, and policymakers track, analyze, and demonstrate how academic research contributes directly to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
To bridge the gap between bibliometric data and societal impact, the initiative combines advanced text-mining search queries with machine-learning algorithms to categorize academic publications across Scopus and SciVal into the 17 SDG areas. These methodologies are continuously refined through community feedback and crowdsourced expertise from international research teams, ensuring high precision and context-sensitive mapping. The resulting open datasets and search queries—which are also utilized by Times Higher Education (THE) for its annual Impact Rankings—enable institutions to benchmark their sustainability research output, identify interdisciplinary synergies, and address unmet research needs across global challenge areas.