Objective

To encourage scholarly publishing venues and research institutions in adopting the SDG indicator taxonomy for solution-oriented research output that allows for direct application to societal and environmental interventions to mitigate climate change, forced migration, war and conflict, and other existential crises of our times. 

The slides are available at DOI 10.5281/zenodo.10029997

Background

Scholarly research more often than not addresses societal and environmental issues, which are also postulated in the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Various initiatives and campaigns exist in which scholarly institutions and stakeholders are advocating for and working towards the achievements of the SDGs, such as The Times Higher Education Impact Rankings for research institutions; and the SDG Publishers Compact to which an increasing number of scholarly publishers expressed their commitment.  

In order to complement the above mentioned activities and to increase the effectiveness of scholarly information sharing across societal sectors, we herewith propose the adoption of the UN SDG Indicator codes as metadata taxonomy in South African institutional repositories. 

Making research results searchable by the 231 SDG indicators assigned to each of the SDGs will allow policy makers, societal actors and practitioners to strategically search and ) interventions for each of the themes as postulated by the SDGs. 

Indicator codes were developed by the United Nations Statistics Division, UNSD, for data transfer, tracking and other statistical purposes.
The global indicator framework includes 231 unique indicators, of which thirteen indicators appear under two or three different targets.