Research contributions to Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs):A comparison using the main bibliometric suites

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) set an ambitious plan for society to create a world in which nobody is excluded. United Nations addressed all its country members to work on the achievement of the 17 goals that encompass 169 targets. The present bibliometric analysis summarises the research published globally on these universal goals. This analysis includes data from Web of Science, Scopus, and Dimensions. This is the first macro-level bibliometric assessment of InCites, SciVal and Dimensions Analytics between 2011-2020. SciVal captures the highest number of publications related to the SDGs, with Dimensions and InCites following behind. The publication results from SciVal and InCites have a very strong relation (0.93), allowing for the conclusion that both might be comparable. The two databases are well-accepted for being the most comprehensive citation databases with similar publication coverage. An exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and principal component analysis (PCA) were used to analyse the indicators related to the SDGs publications. This research suggests that statistical procedures can help us simplify complex and large numbers of indicators and reveal connections to Sustainable Development Goals