Evaluating the Accuracy of the Labeling System in Web of Science for the Sustainable Development Goals

Monitoring and fostering research aligned with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is crucial for formulating evidence-based policies, identifying best practices, and promoting global collaboration. Developing a labeling system is key to facilitate mapping research publications to their related SDGs. The SDGs labeling system integrated in Web of Science (WoS), which assigns Citation Topics instead of individual publication to SDGs, has emerged as a promising tool. However, we still lack of a comprehensive evaluation of the performance of WoS labeling system. By comparing with the Bergen approach, we systematically assessed the relatedness between Citation Topics and SDGs. Our analysis identified 15% of topics showing low relatedness to their assigned SDGs at a 1% threshold. Notably, SDGs such as ‘11 Cities’, ‘07 Energy’, and ‘13 Climate’ exhibited higher percentages of low related topics. In addition, we revealed that certain topics are significantly underrepresented in their relevant SDGs, particularly for ‘02 Hunger’, ‘12 Consumption’, and ‘15 Land’. This study underscores the critical need for continual refinement and validation of SDGs labeling systems in WoS.