The sustainable development goals cover environmental, social and economic development issues, including hunger, poverty, health, education, gender equality, water, sanitation, energy, global warming, urbanization and social justice. The goals are broad and interdependent, but each has a separate list of targets to be achieved. Higher education for sustainability plays a very important role in achieving these goals [1–4].

The bibliometric analysis used the database Scopus/Elsevier to search for the documents. Using the term “sustainable development goals”, TITLE-ABS-KEY “sustainable development goals”, 44,298 documents were identified (a search carried out on January 28th, 2025).

The results obtained in documents can be seen in Table 1, for the first ten positions concerning year, source, author, affiliation, country, document type, scientific area, and funding support. The better results obtained show in function of the number of documents produced: year 2024 (11,485), followed by the years 2023 (8328) and 2022 (42,618); source Sustainability (Switzerland)—MDPI (2702) followed by Journal of Cleaner Production—Elsevier (703) and Journal of Lifestyle and SDGs Review—Editora Alumni In (593); author Leal Filho, W.—Hochschule für Angewandte Wissenschaften Hamburg (54), followed by Bekun, F.V.—İstanbul Gelişim Üniversitesi (51) and Fu, B.—Research Center for Eco-Environmental Sciences Chinese Academy of Sciences and Nhamo, G.—University of South Africa (43); affiliation Chinese Academy of Sciences (799) followed by Organisation Mondiale de la Santé (417) and University of Chinese Academy of Sciences (403); country USA (5763) followed by UK (5163) and India (4891); document type Article (27,508) followed by Book Chapter (5844) and Conference Paper (4694); scientific area Social Sciences (17,461) followed by Environmental Science (16,126) and Energy (7828) and funding support National Natural Science Foundation of China (1623) followed by European Commission (1284) and Ministry of Science and Technology of the People’s Republic of China (921).

TABLE 1

Table 1. Documents (44,298) by (source Scopus/Elsevier, January 28th, 2025).

DATA AVAILABILITY

No data were generated from the study.

CONFLICTS OF INTEREST

The author declares that there is no conflict of interest.