The 2030 Agenda of the United Nations (UN) with its 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the associated 169 sub-goals is a comprehensive programmatic framework for the realization of a global sustainable society - it is the global community's future contract for the 21st century:

https://unsdg.un.org/2030-agenda/universal-values/leave-no-one-behind

Academic research contributes to this on several levels: It creates new knowledge about the causes of complex problems, develops technological and social innovations and provides data and analysis on the basis of which policy-makers and practitioners can plan and evaluate effective measures. Universities and research institutions also train the next generation of specialists and managers who will take responsibility for implementing the SDGs in science, business, administration and civil society. Research performance is automatically assigned to the 17 sustainability goals using keywords that are recorded in a mapping table. It is therefore helpful for researchers to be familiar with this procedure and to take it into account when formulating abstracts or selecting keywords. The number of publications assigned to the 17 SDGs is also included in strategic evaluations, reports and rankings and is becoming increasingly important.

In order for publications to be assigned to one of the 17 SDGs, a keyword search is carried out within the following four areas:

An overview of the keywords and their mappings to SDGs can be found here.

A number of documents (source: Scopus) from the entire University of Cologne can be found here.