Author Identifier (ORCID)
Abstract
Background: Nurses and midwives are central to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as the largest regulated sector of the global health workforce and as professions explicitly encouraged by the International Council of Nurses and the World Health Organization to advance the 2030 Agenda. This paper updates a 2016 bibliometric analysis to examine changes in nursing and midwifery scholarly engagement with the SDGs.
Methods: A bibliometric analysis of Scopus, CINAHL Ultimate, and PubMed was undertaken for publications from 2000 to 2025 containing Millennium Development Goal (MDG) or Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) terminology in nursing and midwifery literature. VOSviewer was used to examine co-authorship, keyword co-occurrence, and temporal publication patterns, identifying keyword co-occurrence groupings and international collaboration networks. As the search captured only explicit MDG/SDG terminology, the paper reflects engagement with MDG/SDG discourse rather than the full potential professional contribution to sustainable development.
Results: The analysis identified 1164 publications and a marked, approximately exponential rise in SDG-related nursing research, increasing by approximately 18% annually. The SDG-tagged share of total nursing and midwifery output rose by approximately 12% annually (p < 0.001). Nine author-labelled keyword co-occurrence groupings mapped collectively onto 15 of the 17 SDGs. Authorship spanned 125 countries, 123 of which formed a connected collaboration network, although high-income countries dominated.
Conclusions: Nursing and midwifery scholarship shows broader engagement with the SDGs than the MDGs. Benchmarking against total nursing and midwifery activity is consistent with intensification of SDG-framed engagement beyond overall publication growth, though the design cannot fully separate substantive contribution from a potential rise in the use of SDG vocabulary alone. Further opportunities for nursing and midwifery research to contribute to the achievement of the SDGs remain, particularly in the domains of environmental sustainability and economic development.
Keywords
bibliometrics, development frameworks, global health, nursing and midwifery research, scientometric analysis, Sustainable Development Goals
Document Type
Journal Article
Date of Publication
1-1-2026
ISSN
13227696
Publication Title
Collegian
Publisher
Elsevier
School
School of Nursing and Midwifery
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Benton, D. C., Benton, A. D., Buchanan, K., Doleman, G., Strickland, K., & Whitehead, L. (2026). The contribution of nursing and midwifery to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals: A bibliometric analysis. Collegian, 33(5), 401–411. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.colegn.2026.07.006