Data

Overview of the data and preprocessing steps

Data and Preprocessing

The Sustainability Office of the University of Basel supplied data from two different databases containing information of the University’s electronic research output (publications and projects).

The publications dataset had to be processed to generate abstracts that could be searched using search queries in English:

Publications

1. The database included journal articles (N = 43,229), book items (chapters, 13,443), journal items (5,028), proceedings items (2,144), and books (1,897).
2. We selected publications with English titles (~85%) and DOI present (~80%) that were published between 2010 and 2020 (~60%) using a custom-made R script. About half of all publications remained.
   
3. We identified abstracts for all publications using rscopus. About ~85% of abstracts could be retrieved.

Publications & Projects

1. Team members identified faculty-level organizational units within the University of Basel (including associated and cross-disciplinary institutes) manually, using the descriptors currently in use at the University of Basel.
2. We used translations of the SDG queries of Elsevier (Jayabalasingham, Boverhof, Agnew & Klein, 2019) and the Aurora network using the corpustools R package to detect whether titles or abstracts were SDG-relevant.

The data is shared via this Github repository.

Variables

Publications

Variable	Description
type	Type of publication.
year	Year of publication.
authors	Author list of publication.
title	Title of publication.
abstract	Abstract of publication.
outlet	Name of journal, book, or proceedings publication.
peer_reviewed	Has publication been subjected to peer review.
organisation	Original list of Unibas organizations involved in publication.
unibas_authors	Publication authors at University of Basel.
unibas_publcation	Publication offically affiliated with University of Basel. (?)
doi	Digital object identfier
Org-*	Logical vectors indicating Unibas faculty-level organizations involved in publication.
SDG-*	Logical vectors indicating whether publication addresses the 17 sustainable development goals.

Projects

Variable	Description
lead	Name of project lead researcher.
co_lead	Names of project co-lead researchers.
organisation	Original list of Unibas organizations involved in project
title	Title of project.
year	Year of project start.
abstract	Abstract of project.
keywords	Keywords of project.
type	Type of project: self- or externally financed.
status	Active or Completed
id	Internal idenifier number
Org-*	Logical vectors indicating Unibas faculty-level organizations involved in project.
SDG-*	Logical vectors indicating whether publication addresses the 17 sustainable development goals.