Sustainable development: An analysis based on conference papers

Abstract

This paper analyzes the significance of international conferences for higher education institutions’ (HEIs) promotion of sustainability by examining their published papers. This study not only allows the understanding of the state of the art but also, based on the identified gaps, sheds light and gives a north for future studies of Sustainable Development. The citations of works published from 2015 to 2019 were analyzed in a sample of 489 articles published in international periodicals included in the Web of Science database related to the subject of sustainable development in higher education. Classic text statistics, similarity analysis and word cloud are used to analyze the articles published on the World Sustainability Symposium, Bridge International Conference 2019 exploring its results and contributions to promote sustainability. The findings suggest that in addition to cooperation, participation and collaboration between institutions, international conferences sponsored or organized by HEIs have the potential to promulgate interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary approaches to addressing global sustainability challenges. In the international conferences analyzed the diverse array of disciplines and research teams illustrate this point. International conferences may be used for communicating the scientific results to stakeholders and send strong messages on sustainability-related issues.