Sustainable Development Goals are presented by the United Nations as a solution to human problems. It is essential that all sectors of societies pay attention to the new goals that are defined for them. As an important part of a society, universities have the potential to play a significant role in this regard, so they need to dedicate some of their educational and research activities to these issues. This research is carried out to study the contribution of active universities in the production of scientific documents related to the sustainable development goals of the United Nations, in the context of their ranks in some well-known global ranking systems, for the purpose of investigating the correlation between the two. To achieve this goal, universities regarded as high ranking in terms of their scientific production volume based on data extracted from the Web of Science database, were identified and compared according to their rankings in the global ranking systems.
The current study is a type of quantitative research that uses the scientometric approach. The research community includes all universities that have produced scientific documents for all of the 16 sustainable development goals, equaling 3907. The research sample was determined using a targeted non-random sampling method to include 2375 cases. IBM SPSS Software package was used to analyze the research data. The degree of correlation was determined through the Kendall's tau-b test.
The research findings indicate that the highest volume of scientific productions published in the field of sustainable development goals have a share of 53% related to goal No. 3. After this, goals No. 11 and 13 with a share of 8 percent have been placed in second place. In addition, Harvard University was recognized as the most productive university in terms of scientific productions related to goals 1, 3, 5, 8, 10 and 16. Chinese Academy of Sciences, Tsinghua, Florida, Toronto and Sorbonne universities have also achieved