“Long walk to 2030”: A bibliometric and systematic review of research trends on the UN sustainable development goal 3

Abstract

Background

Since the initiation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by the United Nations in 2015, researchers worldwide have investigated various aspects of it. One of the key areas of interest is the third SDG, which focuses on health, with its series of indicators.

Objective

This study aims to analyze the contributions of academia by using bibliographic mapping to examine scholarly publications on SDG health from 2015 to 2021.

Methods

We analyzed bibliographic data from The Lens database between 2015 and 2021 using Bibliometrix page and VOSviewer. Our analysis focused on scholarly productivity, bibliometric analysis, and geographic distribution of the outputs.

Results

We retrieved a total of 450 documents from The Lens database, with articles being the most dominant document typology at 99.8%. The mean age of the documents was 3.85 years, with a total of 18,440 citations. The mean citation per document was 40.98, and the mean citation per document per year was 5.85. The leading article, published in The Lancet journal, studied the effect of multiple adverse childhood experiences on health and received 1809 citations in five years. Keyword co-occurrence analysis generated three clusters, with the keyword ‘human’ appearing in 75.11% of all the publications. The University of London and World Health Organization were the leading institutions, while the United Kingdom, the United States, and Switzerland were the most productive countries.

Conclusion

This study provides policymakers working on SDG health with valuable insights into research gaps within the indicators and funding challenges facing developing countries.