Mapping National Research That Targets Sustainable Development Goals: The Responsible Visualization of Openalex Data for Societal Impact Measurements of Research

As one approach to a framework for the responsible use of bibliometrics in research evaluation, we proposed to use global maps using OpenAlex to highlight concepts (i.e., fields of research) where countries are particularly active to achieve United Nations sustainable development goals (UN SDGs). As first examples in this research-in-progress paper, we used the USA and Japan. As to be expected, we found that the USA is very active in many concepts to achieve the SDGs (since the USA is very research active in general). We revealed for Japan that the country has two increased areas of activity to achieve the SDGs: One area is in Medicine and the other in Chemistry and Material Sciences. Our SDG mapping approach combines multiple aspects of the responsible use of bibliometrics in research evaluation: (1) By focusing on SDG relevant research, we provide an innovative approach for measuring target-oriented the societal impact of research. (2) Our approach goes beyond using simple counting of publications or citations by using maps to display complex results. (3) The usage of OpenAlex and free statistics software makes our procedure transparent and reproducible.