Elsevier 2023 SDG mapping
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How to read a Scopus query
The Scopus queries presented in this view correspond to what is known on scopus.com as advanced search queries. Advanced searches allow a query creator to create complex and robust queries using field codes, Boolean operators, or proximity operators. We detail each of these elements below.
Field codes
A typical publication's Scopus record contains a myriad of information about it. To make this information easily usable, this information is structured and parsed apart in different fields, each containing a given type of information. For example, the title field contains a publication's title, and the publication year field informs us about when a given publication was first made public.
Field codes are there to indicate which field(s) we would like to source information from when conducting a given search. To avoid searches becoming overly long, they are usually shortened words such as ABS, which stands for "Abstract". The most commonly-used field codes used by our query-building team are:
- TITLE-ABS-KEY
Searches through the Title, Abstract, and all Keywords - TITLE-ABS
Searches only through the Title and Abstract - AUTHKEY
Searches only through the Author-defined keywords - SRCTITLE
Searches only through the journal or conference proceedings' titles
To conduct a search in a given field, the syntax is always field-code(search-term).
The field codes used can potentially have a deep impact on a search. For example, searching for "Canada" in field AFFILCOUNTRY would return publications where at least one author was affiliated with a Canadian institution, while the same search conducted in field TITLE-ABS-KEY would return articles that concern Canada.
Boolean operators
In most cases, conducting a Scopus search using a single field code or a single term is not sufficient to obtain a robust set of results. To remedy this, Scopus searches make use of boolean operators to allow for the combination of different terms or query parts. The allowed operators are
- OR
At least one of the terms must appear in the specified field, or at least one of the searches must match - AND
Both of the terms must appear in the specified field, or both searches must match - AND NOT
Only the first term must appear in the specified field, or only the first search must match
Boolean operators are applied in the order they were listed above. Therefore, KEY(mouse AND NOT cat OR dog) is interpreted as KEY((mouse) AND NOT (cat OR dog)).
Proximity operators
In some instances, a certain word is deemed relevant to a topic only if it is close to another word in the text, or certain phrasings might space out two related words defining a topic, which we could want to be tolerant to. For example, the sentence "publishing scholarly journals" is relevant to the topic of "scholarly publishing", but searching for "scholarly publishing" alone would not capture an article that used this expression.
Using proximity searches enable building queries that are tolerant to such things. Two proximity search operators are available in Scopus:
- W/n
Both terms must be within n words of each other, but not in any particular order - PRE/n
Both terms must be within n words of each other, in the order they are listed in
For example, the search TITLE-ABS-KEY("journal" W/2 "publishing") would capture the sentence from the example above, but TITLE-ABS-KEY("journal" PRE/2 "publishing") would not, since the words are not in the same order.
Introduction
The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) challenge the global community to build a world where no one is left behind.
Since 2018, Elsevier has generated SDG search queries to help researchers and institutions track and demonstrate progress toward the SDG targets. In the past 3 years, these queries, along with the university’s own data and evidence supporting progress and contributions to the particular SDG outside of research-based metrics, are used for the THE Impact Rankings.
Method
For 2025, the SDGs use the exact same search query and ML algorithm as the Elsevier 2023 SDG mappings, with only minor modifications coming from changes to the search engine handling the SDG queries. Because of this, while the vast majority of publications retain their original mapping, the number of publications in each SDG has slightly changed.
All these changes were implemented to streamline how SDG queries are handled. Users should note that running these in Scopus should be done for reference purposes only, as the Scopus search engine behaves slightly differently than the classifier used to formerly tag SDGs to publications. Full details of the 2023 methodology are available on Digital Commons Data.
SDG 13 – Climate Action
Query
Below is the full search query used for SDG 13 – Climate Action. We’ve broken it down by each query component. Use the + and – buttons to expand or concatenate the different bracket levels.