Sustainable Development Goals in Psychology: A Century of Progress in Publications

Abstract

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) offer a lens for tracking societal change, yet contributions from the social and behavioral sciences have rarely been integrated into policy agendas. To take stock and create a baseline and benchmark for the future, we assemble 233,061 psychology publications (1894 -- 2022) and tag them to the 17 SDGs using a query-based classifier. Health, education, work, inequality, and gender dominate the study of SDGs in psychology, shifting from an early focus on work to education and inequality, and since the 1960s, health. United States-based research leads across most goals. Other countries set distinct priorities (e.g., China: education and work; Australia: health). Women comprise about one-third of authors, concentrated in social and health goals, but have been underrepresented in STEM-oriented goals. The 2015 launch of the SDGs marked a turning point: SDG-tagged publications have been receiving more citations than comparable non-SDG work, reversing a pre-2015 deficit. Tracking the SDGs through psychology clarifies long-run engagement with social priorities, identifies evidence gaps, and guides priorities to accelerate the field's contribution to the SDG agenda.

Figures (3)

• Figure 1: Trends in SDG-related psychological research and associated topics over time. Panels are ordered by their overall proportion among all psychology publications. The x-axis indicates publication year, and the y-axis indicates the proportion of psychology publications associated with each SDG among all SDG-related papers. In each SDG panel, the three most frequent keywords are shown for the historical periods pre-1920, 1920–1959, 1960–1999, 2000–2014, and post-2015, with percentages in parentheses indicating their relative frequency.
• Figure 2: National and gendered contributions to SDG-related psychological research. Panel (a) compares the country-level contributions to SDG-related psychological research among the top ten countries with the largest overall output of SDG-related psychology publications (USA, CAN, GBR, AUS, DEU, NLD, ISR, CHE, ITA, CHN) across all SDGs. The x-axis represents the SDGs, and the y-axis shows each country’s percentage share of publications within that SDG relative to the overall share of publications associated with that SDG. Panel (b) presents the mean proportion of women authors per publication, and the shares of publications first- and last-authored by women, across each SDG. The dotted lines indicate the average level of each corresponding proportion for all SDGs.
• Figure 3: predicted citation scores of SDG papers before versus after 2015 The dashed vertical line marks the baseline citation level for non-SDG publications before 2015, while the solid vertical line marks the baseline after 2015. Empty circles with dashed 95% confidence intervals show the estimated citation counts for SDG-related publications in that goal prior to 2015, whereas solid circles with solid confidence intervals show the estimates for SDG-related publications after 2015