Sustainable Development in Higher Education …
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embracing other fundamental concerns for development and welfare of humanity
and its environments (World Health Organization 2015).
Despite being designed to be universal in the sense of embodying a universally
shared common global vision of progress towards a safe, just and sustainable space for
all human beings to thrive on the planet, all goals and targets present different levels of
challenges and ambition, considering current development states and other conditions
that are particular to each nation (Osborn et al. 2015). Due to the need for global,
integrated and scientifically based information on sustainable development (Hák et al.
2016), SDGs represent a more efficient agenda when compared to MDGs—since
they represent an integrated system, facilitating interaction between policy-makers
(Le Blanc 2015) and being comprehensive in meeting the needs of developed and
developing countries.
4 Methodology
The previous section illuminated the context and importance of the role that HEIs
can play in promoting SD. But what are the issues that fall under the ambit of
sustainable development and how do we translate these concerns into an analytical
accounting context that distinguishes social and/or environmental accounting more
clearly from any putative accounting for SD? Clearly, the literature output from the
HEIs offers a measurable parameter but what analysis do we apply considering the
rapidly growing volume of Web-based free-text documents containing information
on science and technology (Chu et al. 2005)? To answer these questions an analysis
of SD research in HEIs was conducted using a computational ontology approach
based on Ceci et al. (2012) This data mining methodology represents a significant
improvement over conventional manual methods in representing large amounts of
information and is a process applied five distinct phases as shown in Fig. 1.
The first phases consists of a literature audit of papers in a target journal
IJSHE, a reputable and typical forum for the publication of SD activities in the
HEI sector and is published by Emerald Publishing. Emerald itself was founded
in 1967 with its mission to defend new ideas that promote research and practice
in business, management, health and social care, education and engineering and
features an extensive portfolio of more than 300 journals, 2500 books and 1500
teaching cases (Emerald 2019b). It is abstracted and indexed in: A + Education,
Australian Education Index, BFI (Denmark), Cabell’s Directory of Publishing Opportunities in Educational Psychology and Administration, Current Contents/Social and
Behavioral Sciences, EBSCO, Environmental Abstracts, e-psyche, ERIC, HEDBIB,
Journal Citation Reports/Social Sciences Edition (ISI), LexisNexis Environmental,
Norwegian Journal for Scientific Journals, QUALIS (A2), ReadCube Discover, The
Publication Forum (Finland) (Emerald 2019a). It has a 2020 impact factor of 1.73
and a 5 year impact factor of 2.377 (Emerald 2019a). Additionally it is ranked by
Scopus since 2000 with the information: Cite Score 2018: 2.29; SCImago Journal
Rank (SJR) 2018: 0.542 and Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP) 2018:
525
embracing other fundamental concerns for development and welfare of humanity
and its environments (World Health Organization 2015).
Despite being designed to be universal in the sense of embodying a universally
shared common global vision of progress towards a safe, just and sustainable space for
all human beings to thrive on the planet, all goals and targets present different levels of
challenges and ambition, considering current development states and other conditions
that are particular to each nation (Osborn et al. 2015). Due to the need for global,
integrated and scientifically based information on sustainable development (Hák et al.
2016), SDGs represent a more efficient agenda when compared to MDGs—since
they represent an integrated system, facilitating interaction between policy-makers
(Le Blanc 2015) and being comprehensive in meeting the needs of developed and
developing countries.
4 Methodology
The previous section illuminated the context and importance of the role that HEIs
can play in promoting SD. But what are the issues that fall under the ambit of
sustainable development and how do we translate these concerns into an analytical
accounting context that distinguishes social and/or environmental accounting more
clearly from any putative accounting for SD? Clearly, the literature output from the
HEIs offers a measurable parameter but what analysis do we apply considering the
rapidly growing volume of Web-based free-text documents containing information
on science and technology (Chu et al. 2005)? To answer these questions an analysis
of SD research in HEIs was conducted using a computational ontology approach
based on Ceci et al. (2012) This data mining methodology represents a significant
improvement over conventional manual methods in representing large amounts of
information and is a process applied five distinct phases as shown in Fig. 1.
The first phases consists of a literature audit of papers in a target journal
IJSHE, a reputable and typical forum for the publication of SD activities in the
HEI sector and is published by Emerald Publishing. Emerald itself was founded
in 1967 with its mission to defend new ideas that promote research and practice
in business, management, health and social care, education and engineering and
features an extensive portfolio of more than 300 journals, 2500 books and 1500
teaching cases (Emerald 2019b). It is abstracted and indexed in: A + Education,
Australian Education Index, BFI (Denmark), Cabell’s Directory of Publishing Opportunities in Educational Psychology and Administration, Current Contents/Social and
Behavioral Sciences, EBSCO, Environmental Abstracts, e-psyche, ERIC, HEDBIB,
Journal Citation Reports/Social Sciences Edition (ISI), LexisNexis Environmental,
Norwegian Journal for Scientific Journals, QUALIS (A2), ReadCube Discover, The
Publication Forum (Finland) (Emerald 2019a). It has a 2020 impact factor of 1.73
and a 5 year impact factor of 2.377 (Emerald 2019a). Additionally it is ranked by
Scopus since 2000 with the information: Cite Score 2018: 2.29; SCImago Journal
Rank (SJR) 2018: 0.542 and Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP) 2018: