International sustainability rankings
reflections on the limits of the 2030 Agenda as a metric of the social impact of universities’ academic output
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.21530/ci.v21n2.2026.1619Keywords:
Sustainability, Universities, SDG, Rankings, 2030 Agenda, Racial InequalityAbstract
International sustainability rankings have consolidated themselves as instruments for
assessing the social impact of universities, using the Sustainable Development Goals
(SDGs) as a structuring reference. Drawing on the question of how the adoption of this
metric by rankings affects university academic output, this article argues that such rankings
tend to produce systematic invisibilities in this field. To demonstrate this empirically, we
conducted a bibliometric mapping of master’s dissertations and doctoral theses defended at
the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo (PUC-SP) between 2017 and 2021, applying
and testing the thematic classification methodology of the SciVal/Elsevier platform and
constructing complementary search strings for SDG 17 and the theme of racial inequality.
The results show that 78% of the 4,956 works analyzed were not classified under any SDG,
and that the complementary strings identified 182 additional works entirely invisible to the
rankings’ classification criteria. These findings demonstrate that the invisibilities produced
are not inevitable technical limitations, but the reflection of methodological and political
choices that transfer to the academic field the disputes that marked the very construction
of the 2030 Agenda.
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Copyright (c) 2026 Terra Friedrich Budini, Jefferson de Oliveira Silva, Natália Maria Félix de Souza, Mariana Jansen Ferreira
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