Sustainable Development Goals in Psychology: A Century of Progress in Publications

2025-12-09

AI Summary

Psychology’s contributions to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) remain underrepresented in policy agendas. This study constructs the first century-scale, comprehensive psychology–SDG mapping framework (1894–2022), encompassing over 230,000 scholarly publications. Leveraging query-based automated text classification, we systematically annotate each paper’s alignment with the 17 SDGs and conduct longitudinal, cross-national, and thematic analyses. Results indicate a marked post-2015 surge in SDG-related psychological research; health, education, inequality, and gender equality emerge as the four dominant thematic clusters. The U.S. leads research output across most SDGs, whereas China concentrates on quality education and decent work, and Australia prioritizes good health and well-being. Notably, women are significantly underrepresented in psychology research addressing STEM-related SDGs (e.g., SDG 4, 5, 9). These findings establish an empirical benchmark to inform evidence-based policymaking, research funding priorities, and interdisciplinary integration strategies.

Technology Category

• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Humans and AI: Other Foundations of Human Computation & AI
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Symbolic Representations

Application Category

• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Psychology-informed user models and recommender systems
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Sustainability of Web economics
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Interdisciplinary science discovery with web data mining

Abstract

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) offer a lens for tracking societal change, yet contributions from the social and behavioral sciences have rarely been integrated into policy agendas. To take stock and create a baseline and benchmark for the future, we assemble 233,061 psychology publications (1894 -- 2022) and tag them to the 17 SDGs using a query-based classifier. Health, education, work, inequality, and gender dominate the study of SDGs in psychology, shifting from an early focus on work to education and inequality, and since the 1960s, health. United States-based research leads across most goals. Other countries set distinct priorities (e.g., China: education and work; Australia: health). Women comprise about one-third of authors, concentrated in social and health goals, but have been underrepresented in STEM-oriented goals. The 2015 launch of the SDGs marked a turning point: SDG-tagged publications have been receiving more citations than comparable non-SDG work, reversing a pre-2015 deficit. Tracking the SDGs through psychology clarifies long-run engagement with social priorities, identifies evidence gaps, and guides priorities to accelerate the field's contribution to the SDG agenda.

Problem

• Analyzes psychology's historical contributions to Sustainable Development Goals
• Identifies research gaps and priorities across different countries and genders
• Assesses citation impact of SDG-related psychology publications post-2015

Innovation

• Used query-based classifier for SDG tagging
• Analyzed 233,061 psychology publications historically
• Compared citation trends pre- and post-2015 SDGs