Sustainable Development Goals

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals may be included in an article’s keywords, and special tagging should be applied to Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) keywords to create consistency and improve discoverability. SDG keywords may be included as individual keywords within a list of author-supplied keywords or as a secondary keyword list for Sustainable Development Goals. In either case, each SDG keyword should be tagged in a <kwd> element with a @vocab-term-identifier attribute populated using the relevant persistent identifier assigned by the United Nations.

The @vocab-term-identifier attribute can be added to SDG keywords after an article has been published without changing the text of the keyword.

During production, keywords that are identified as SDG keywords but have variations should be made to be consistent with the keywords in the table below.

When a keyword list contains an SDG Goal such as “SDG 1: No poverty” or a recognizable variation such as “Goal 1”, “SDG 1”, “SDG1”, or “No poverty”, this keyword should be tagged using the relevant identifier. Refer to the table below for a list of SDG Goal keywords, common variations, and identifiers.

This example shows SDG Goal “SDG 1: No poverty” tagged as a keyword with its identifier as it would appear in a keyword list.

<kwd vocab-term-identifier="http://metadata.un.org/sdg/1">SDG 1: No poverty</kwd>

When an keyword list contains “Sustainable Development Goals” or “SDGs” or “Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)” or a recognizable variation such as “SDG” without a number, this keyword should tagged using the identifier http://metadata.un.org/sdg. During production authors may be queried to select specific SDG Goals as keywords, if possible, rather than broadly referring to Sustainable Development Goals.

This example shows “Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)” tagged as a keyword with its identifier as it would appear in a keyword list.

<kwd vocab-term-identifier="http://metadata.un.org/sdg">Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)</kwd>

This example shows a list of author-supplied keywords that includes “SDG 10: Reduced inequalities” and “Sustainable Development Goals” tagged with persistent identifiers.

<kwd-group kwd-group-type="author">
    <title>KEYWORDS</title>
    <kwd>Income distribution</kwd>
    <kwd>convergence</kwd>
    <kwd>regional disparities</kwd>
    <kwd vocab-term-identifier="http://metadata.un.org/sdg/10">SDG 10: Reduced inequalities</kwd>
    <kwd vocab-term-identifier="http://metadata.un.org/sdg">Sustainable Development Goals</kwd>
    <kwd>inequality</kwd>
    <kwd>decomposition</kwd>
</kwd-group>

When a dedicated keyword list for Sustainable Development Goals is present it should be tagged in its own <kwd-group> element. This can be a separate secondary keyword list in addition to a list of author-supplied keywords. This <kwd-group> should have attribute kwd-group-type="SDG" and attribute vocab-identifier="http://metadata.un.org/sdg", and contain the title <title>Sustainable Development Goals</title>. Each keyword should be tagged in its own <kwd> element and have the relevant identifier tagged in the @vocab-term-identifier attribute.

This example shows a dedicated SDG keyword list containing SDG Goals.

<kwd-group kwd-group-type="SDG" vocab-identifier="http://metadata.un.org/sdg">
    <title>Sustainable Development Goals</title>
    <kwd vocab-term-identifier="http://metadata.un.org/sdg/1">SDG 1: No poverty</kwd>
    <kwd vocab-term-identifier="http://metadata.un.org/sdg/5">SDG 5: Gender equality</kwd>
    <kwd vocab-term-identifier="http://metadata.un.org/sdg/6">SDG 6: Clean water and sanitation</kwd>
    <kwd vocab-term-identifier="http://metadata.un.org/sdg/10">SDG 10: Reduced inequalities</kwd>
</kwd-group>

The above example may be rendered in a PDF or online similar to the following example:

This table lists each SDG Goal with its preferred spelling and variations and its persistent identifier. The information in this table is directly from the official Sustainable Development Goals Taxonomy. The variations that are shown in this table are recognized alternative labels and not an exhaustive list of all variations.

This next table shows the overarching term Sustainable Development Goals with its preferred spelling and variations and its persistent identifier from the Sustainable Development Goals Taxonomy. The variations that are shown in this table are not an exhaustive list of all variations.

Note: The Sustainable Development Goals Taxonomy contans terms and persistent identifiers for each Target and Indicator, which are sub-topics within each Goal. Some journal articles have Targets and Indicators in the author-supplied keyword list. At the present time the SDG Keywords pilot is only using Goals. Also, there is capability within JATS to have SDG terms that appear in the text of an article tagged with persistent identifiers, but at the present time the SDG Keywords pilot is only concerned with article keywords. These options may be evaluated at a later date. If there is a need for these options please reach out to the SDG Keywords project team.