Divergence between university SDG reporting and the Impact ranking profiles: implications for accountability

Universities communicate their contributions to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) through institution-wide sustainability reports and through external ranking systems, but these public channels are produced by different mechanisms. This study examines two related questions: how review-ready university SDG disclosures are as accountability documents, and how the SDGs foregrounded in institutional reports diverge from those made most visible through Times Higher Education (THE) Impact Ranking profiles. The analysis uses 107 university SDG or sustainability disclosures retained from an initial frame of 250 universities in the THE Impact Rankings 2025. The SDG Disclosure Review-Readiness Index (SDG-DRRI), a study-specific diagnostic instrument grounded in accountability and sustainability-reporting literature, assesses strategic alignment, governance and accountability, metrics and evidence, SDG coverage and prioritisation, and review readiness. A second-stage directional comparison contrasts report-based SDG salience with ranking-visible SDGs while explicitly recognising that THE profiles are shaped by institutional submissions, bibliometric data, scoring rules and the platform’s selection of strongest SDG results. Only 29.0% of analysed disclosures reached high review-readiness. Institutional reports strongly foregrounded SDG 4 and other mission-related goals, whereas THE profiles made a different set of SDGs more visible. The study does not interpret this divergence as evidence of manipulation, weak commitment or inconsistent performance. Rather, it distinguishes dual-channel SDG visibility, cross-channel divergence and unreconciled divergence. Unreconciled divergence is treated as a conditional interpretive concept rather than a measured outcome because the study did not systematically code whether each university provided a reconciliation explanation. A concise SDG reconciliation statement is proposed to make the relationship between institutional priorities and ranking-visible outcomes more transparent and reviewable.