How is social work research addressing the Sustainable Development Goals? A machine learning approach to tackling the 2030 Agenda

Social work is increasingly engaging with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. The aim of this study is to analyse Sustainable Development Goals in social work research and identify their alignment with the 17 Sustainable Development Goals, using a machine learning text-classification approach on 4409 articles (2016–2024). Results show that social work research most frequently addresses reduced inequalities (Sustainable Development Goal 10), decent work and economic growth (Sustainable Development Goal 8), quality education (Sustainable Development Goal 4) and justice and strong institutions (Sustainable Development Goal 16), often in interconnected ways. In contrast, environmental goals are underrepresented. We discuss implications for broadening social work towards the full 2030 Agenda.