This dataset presents trends in the total number of scientific publications relevant to societal goals, as proxied by the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) framework, expressed in fractional counts, for the 2015–2023 period. Coverage includes OECD member and accession countries, key partners (Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, and South Africa), and other selected non-OECD economies.
This is an experimental indicator, developed under the OECD’s Fundstat initiative to improve evidence on the directionality and societal relevance of research and development (R&D) activities, by linking scientific output to 17 SDGs or none. To produce this indicator, the OECD developed a probabilistic AI-assisted classification model that identifies the SDG relevance of scientific publications based on their titles and abstracts. The approach builds on insights from the OECD International Survey of Science (ISSA2021), in which researchers reported which SDG their research contributed to. Using these responses, a labelled dataset was created to fine-tune SciBERT, a large language model (LLM) pre-trained on scientific literature, enabling it to predict the probability of relevance of a given text to each of the 17 SDGs, or to none. The trained classifier is then applied to publication titles and abstracts from the Scopus Custom Data. Publication counts are fractionalised across countries and aggregated annually for comparability.
For further information on the methodology, see: Aristodemou, L., et al. (forthcoming), “Assessing the direction of R&D funding towards the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) with a new classifier and the OECD Fundstat infrastructure”, OECD Science, Technology and Industry Working Papers.
Source: OECD Bibliometric Indicators, calculations based on Elsevier's Scopus Custom Data, Elsevier, Version 1.2025.
Please cite as: OECD (2025), OECD Bibliometric indicators, OECD Science, Technology and Innovation Statistics, http://oe.cd/scientometrics, accessed on xx/xx/xxxx.
", "fields": { "REF_AREA": { "type": "dimension", "concept": "REF_AREA", "label": "Reference area", "description": "", "codelist": "CL_AREA" }, "MEASURE": { "type": "dimension", "concept": "MEASURE", "label": "Measure", "description": "", "codelist": "CL_MEASURE_BIBLIO" }, "UNIT_MEASURE": { "type": "dimension", "concept": "UNIT_MEASURE", "label": "Unit of measure", "description": "Unit in which the data values are expressed.", "codelist": "CL_UNIT_MEASURE" }, "SDG_GOAL": { "type": "dimension", "concept": "SDG_GOAL", "label": "SDG goal", "description": "", "codelist": "CL_SDG_GOAL" }, "TIME_PERIOD": { "type": "time", "label": "Time period", "description": "Observation time period" }, "DECIMALS": { "type": "attribute", "concept": "DECIMALS", "label": "Decimals", "description": "", "codelist": "CL_DECIMALS" }, "UNIT_MULT": { "type": "attribute", "concept": "UNIT_MULT", "label": "Unit multiplier", "description": "", "codelist": "CL_UNIT_MULT" }, "OBS_VALUE": { "type": "measure", "concept": "OBS_VALUE", "label": "Observation Value", "description": "Observation Value" } }, "codelists": { "CL_MEASURE_BIBLIO": { "FPUBS_NBFRAC": "Fractional counts of scientific publications", "ISCORR_X": "Corresponding/leading author scientific publications", "INTL_X": "International collaboration scientific publications", "TOP10_X": "Scientific publications in the world 10% top-cited publications", "TOP10FPUBS_NBFRAC": "Fractional counts of scientific publications among the world's 10% top-cited scientific publications", "NORMCIT_X": "Normalised citation impact", "SPEC_I": "Specialisation index relative to world of scientific publications", "BILAT_AUT": "Scientific authors", "COLLAB": "Bilateral international collaboration, whole counts", "NORMW": "Normalised bilateral international collaboration intensity" }, "CL_SDG_GOAL": { "G_0": "No relevance", "G_1": "Goal 1. End poverty in all its forms everywhere", "G_2": "Goal 2. End hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture", "G_3": "Goal 3. Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages", "G_4": "Goal 4. Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all", "G_5": "Goal 5. Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls", "G_6": "Goal 6. Ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all", "G_7": "Goal 7. Ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all", "G_8": "Goal 8. Promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all", "G_9": "Goal 9. Build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive and sustainable industrialization and foster innovation", "G_10": "Goal 10. Reduce inequality within and among countries", "G_11": "Goal 11. Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable", "G_12": "Goal 12. Ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns", "G_13": "Goal 13. Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts", "G_14": "Goal 14. Conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas and marine resources for sustainable development", "G_15": "Goal 15. Protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, sustainably manage forests, combat desertification, and halt and reverse land degradation and halt biodiversity loss", "G_16": "Goal 16. Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels", "G_17": "Goal 17. Strengthen the means of implementation and revitalize the global partnership for sustainable development" } } }