# The Trends and Content of Research Related to the Sustainable Development Goals: A Systemic Review
## 1 Introduction  
As first addressed in the historical document _Our Common Future_, \"sustainable development\" for ensuring intergenerational justice for human beings has been advocated and studied for decades since the late 1980s [1]. In the Millennium Summit of the United Nations in 2000, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) were agreed upon for shaping the 21 st century. Eight goals and a corresponding twenty-one targets were announced and to be achieved by the end of 2015. The need for a new framework of goals to succeed in the MDGs was discussed in the World Sustainable Development Summit, also known as Rio+20, held in 2012. Thus, the construction of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) was noted in the concluding document _The Future We Want_ as a mission to be completed before 2016 [2]. The SDGs were then accepted as a resolution titled _Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development_, adopted by the UN General Assembly in September 2015 [3]. People, planet, prosperity, peace, and partnership were the five Ps emphasized as the cores. As before, the UN made a strong statement on eradicating poverty in allforms as the most crucial challenge. Moreover, integration and indivisibility of the 17 SDGs and relevant 169 targets for supporting balanced economic, social, and environmental sustainability. Since then, more and more actions have been stimulated following the framework and values of the SDGs. A large number of academic studies have also offered strong support for the SDGs' progress, ranging from strategic plans, policy adaptation, implementation tools, and SDG-specified actions. More studies concerning the commitments and alignment of countries' SDGs and their stage achievements can be found in the literature in relatively earlier years. For example, [PERSON] et al. [4] found that increased attention and visibility of the SDGs in a country, together with specified customized targets, may improve application effectiveness and the projects and reviews that followed. A systemic review of many reports and articles identified significant signs of progress in implementing SDGs for the first two years. However, a lack of system thinking and integrated analytical methodologies and tools was identified [5; 6; 7]. [PERSON] et al. conducted a literature-based review to detect the problems and opportunities of employing the SDGs. They concluded that more resources on education and information, promising political leadership and governance, international partnership, innovation, and aggregated and reliable indicators are necessary to fill the gaps [8]. More studies focusing on implementing the SDGs' challenges and opportunities were published with varied scopes [9; 10]. Sustainable development should be framed and interpreted as a comprehensive connotation that can balance the triple bottom lines (TBLs), i.e., economy, society, and environment, and cannot be overemphasized. Thus, any issue in the real world can be linked to some SDGs with different contents of connectivity. These can be reflected in the SDG-related literature, with some studies concentrating on a specific SDG or even some targets, while many are associated with several SDGs. Bibliometric approaches and other \"systematic review of the literature\" (SRL) methods were employed to find out essential information implicitly existing in the studies. For example, [PERSON] et al. analyzed more than 1000 SDG-related articles in the Scopus database from 2015 to 2018. They found SDG 3 (good health and well-being) had the highest preference among the papers [11], consistent with the results from other studies [12]. The SDG 3-10 pair took the lead in the tied frequencies. When looking at the topics, [PERSON] et al. recognized the top five paper themes with the content of the SDGs from both Web of Science and Scopus were human, SDG, health policy, greenhouse gases, and maternal health services through extensively examining more than 10,000 articles from 2016 to 2020 [13].