Exploratory factor analysis of bibliometric indicators for the Sustainable Development Goals

Barbara S. Lancho Barrantes ()
Additional contact information
Barbara S. Lancho Barrantes: University of Brighton

Scientometrics, 2025, vol. 130, issue 3, No 15, 1729 pages

Abstract: Abstract Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) aim to create an inclusive world for everyone. The United Nations has urged all member states to work towards achieving 17 goals by 2030, including 169 targets. The UN emphasises that achieving these SDGs will not be possible without the support and effort of academic and scientific research worldwide. Various bibliometric databases have developed search strings to capture publications related to the SDGs to assist the academic community in measuring their contributions to these goals. After reviewing these databases, it became evident that Clarivate InCites Benchmarking & Analytics provides the most extensive number of indicators for analysing SDG-related research. To identify a small number of factors that explain most of the variance observed in a much larger number of manifest bibliometric indicators, this study employs exploratory factor analysis (EFA) to reduce the information associated with each SDG. This method will help reveal associations among indicators of the impact of academic contributions on achieving the SDGs worldwide. The publication data ranges from 2014 to 2023 and is organised by SDG using data Web of Science. SPSS software has been used to perform the EFA. The results from the factor analysis indicate that the first three components explain a substantial 79.24% of the variance of all indicators, highlighting their importance in the context of the SDG analysis.

Keywords: Bibliometrics analysis; Sustainable Development Goals; Exploratory factor analysis; InCites; Scientific productivity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11192-025-05256-8 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:scient:v:130:y:2025:i:3:d:10.1007_s11192-025-05256-8

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/11192

DOI: 10.1007/s11192-025-05256-8

Access Statistics for this article

Scientometrics is currently edited by Wolfgang Glänzel

More articles in Scientometrics from Springer, Akadémiai Kiadó
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().