University of Southern California
AC-9: Research and Scholarship

The attached file "STARS_2023_AC-9_USC_2020_2021_2022" is a record of all USC scholars (including USC postdocs, grad and professional students, faculty, and staff that conduct research). This file includes each scholar's Scopus authorID (if applicable), their names, USC Departments, USC Divisions/Schools, the total number of publications that they published within the calendar years 2020, 2021 & 2022, the titles of these publications (in string form and separated by publication type in relation to the sustainability classification), the automated sustainability classification of the cumulative published work, the manually corrected sustainability classification of their cumulative published work*, the UN SDGs that their cumulative published work maps to (automated), and the SDG keywords that were found in their published work (automated based on the publication title, abstract, author keywords and index keywords).

*We manually corrected Sustainability-Focused scholars that were not sustainability-focused (and changed them to the appropriate category, eg. Sustainability-Inclusive, etc.) and reassigned scholars that were not automated as 'Sustainability-Focused' but were identified as Sustainability-Focused in our 2021 STARS report AND had publications that we manually deemed to be 'Sustainablity-Focused'. We did not manually reassign other scholars to other categories due to the intense time commitment that this would take, and thus are presenting a conservative estimate of 'Sustainability-Focused' scholars from USC.

In addition, we would like to note that USC has many Scholars whom we deemed 'Sustainability-Inclusive' (their work relates heavily to more than one of the UN SDGs) and 'SDG-Related' (their work relates heavily to one of the 17 UN SDGs), but we did not include those in the tallies for this STARS credit since we are intent on focusing on the researchers that intersect the socioeconomic and environmental pillars of sustainability and/or focus on a major sustainability issue (such as climate change, pollution, etc). The attached spreadsheet has all of the scholars as categorized by these various sustainability classifications, including the scholars whom do not have work related to sustainability (as deemed by our automated program).

Data Overview:
Research data was pulled from Scopus Advanced Search by searching for USC-affiliated research products published between 2020 and 2022 calendar years. Metadata included: author names, author IDs, USC affiliations (Department and Divisions), publication title, publication abstract, author keywords, index keywords, publishing journal name, etc. Data was cleaned and compiled in the R statistical program. Author IDs and affiliations were corrected as needed by pulling data from the USC directory and compiling the data from there, as well as manually correcting affiliations and author IDs for where errors occurred.

Brief Methodology of Sustainability Classification Process (similar to AC-1):
OoS was inspired by the UN SDG keyword mapping (indexing) process and dashboard used by Carnegie Mellon, and developed our SDG keyword list and dashboard code from those originally provided by Alex Hinicker and Peter Wu.

OoS (data analyst Julie Hopper and PSIP interns Brian Tinsley and Alison Chen) worked with USC’s Presidential Working Group in Education (PWG-E) to further edit and clean the SDG keyword list: https://github.com/USC-Office-of-Sustainability/SustainabilityCourseFinder/blob/main/shiny_app/usc_keywords.csv

Research publication text (title, abstracts and keywords) were combined for classification and mapping purposes. OoS removed all punctuation from the research publication text (for each publication) and transformed all text to lowercase formatting (to assist with keyword mapping).

OoS ran context-dependency code across the research data to correct keywords in the research text based on their context and the adjacent words. (Example: biological law becomes biological domain to avoid mapping to SDG 16 based on the keyword ‘law’)

A full list of context dependent replacements and our keywords can be viewed in our GitHub.
https://github.com/USC-Office-of-Sustainability/SustainabilityResearchFinder

OoS used the Text2SDG package in R to map keywords associated with each of the SDGs to the research text file for each publication row. OoS implemented the rule that a keyword in the research text for each publication could only count once per SDG (no duplicate counts).

To classify as “Sustainability-Focused”, the research text for each publication had to include at least two keywords that mapped to an environmental SDG (6, 7, 12, 13, 14, 15 ) AND at least two keywords that mapped to a socioeconomic SDG (1-5, 8-11, 16, 17)*. *Designations of which SDGs were environmental and which were socioeconomic were based on the SDG descriptions and targets: https://sdgs.un.org/goals

To classify research as “Sustainability-Inclusive”, a research publication text had to include at least two keywords that mapped to at least two 17 UN SDGs within EITHER a socioeconomic or environmental SDG category.

To classify research as “SDG-Related", a research publication text had to include at least two keywords that mapped to one of the 17 UN SDGs.

Research with text that mapped to <2 SDG keywords were classified as “Not-Related” to sustainability.

OoS manually reviewed the resulting mapped research data file continuously while developing the methodology to achieve better accuracy before achieving the final code (cleaning, context dependency, mapping and classification) and keyword list.

*Following the automated process, we manually corrected Sustainability-Focused scholars that were not sustainability-focused (and changed them to the appropriate category, eg. Sustainability-Inclusive, etc.) and reassigned scholars that were not automated as 'Sustainability-Focused' but were identified as Sustainability-Focused in our 2021 STARS report AND had publications that we manually deemed to be 'Sustainablity-Focused'. We did not manually reassign other scholars due to the intense time commitment that this would take, and thus are presenting a conservative estimate of 'Sustainability-Focused' scholars from USC.

The summary of all the USC research scholars and their publication data is attached below. OoS also created a 'Sustainability Research Finder' Dashboard that can be viewed here:
https://usc-sustainability.shinyapps.io/research_dashboard/

All source code can be viewed here: https://github.com/USC-Office-of-Sustainability/SustainabilityResearchFinder

The Github Readme is currently being updated (02/06/24) and should be useable by others May 2024. Raw dataset files are not in the GitHub folder due to the large size of the files, but are available upon request. The methodology for this process and thereby the code will continue to evolve and progress with ongoing feedback.

Data are based on research publication data between 2020 and 2022. If research scholars joined USC following these publication time periods, then their data will be reflected in our next update once we pull data from the calendar year of 2023. Similarly, if a research scholar was at USC in this time period, but their affiliation status on a publication in that time period was at a different institution, then unfortunately that publication will not be captured in our database or analysis. The percent of employees engaged in sustainability research and percent of departments with employees engaged in sustainability research are based on the percent of those conducting sustainability-focused research only (rather than sustainability-inclusive research) to remain on the conservative side.

*Please note the # of departments in this credit differs from that of which is in AC-1 or PRE-5 since many researchers did not list their affiliated academic department (within a USC School) but instead listed their affiliated USC Research Center, Institute or Program on the publication. Thus, for this credit, 'Departments' includes 'Academic Departments, Research Institutes, Research Centers and large Research Programs.

For more information and to see the source code, please visit our Research Finder Dashboard: https://usc-sustainability.shinyapps.io/research_dashboard/

and visit our GitHub page: https://github.com/USC-Office-of-Sustainability/SustainabilityResearchFinder