Hello, my name is Joachim Pfaffel. I'm a researcher in information and documentation science

at the University of Lille in France. Together with my colleague Helene Prost, we will present a study on the French PhD thesis on sustainable development.

The focus of the GL 2023 conference is on sustainable development. Also, our communication has two objectives. First, to provide a scientific review

of French research on sustainable development and second, to provide and to show evidence that grey literature can provide interesting and complementary evidence for this kind of analysis.

We could have made this study with reports or with communications or other unpublished papers,

but there are at least two reasons for our choice of PhD thesis. First, they offer a representative perspective on the current academic research

at universities worldwide and of course in France. And second, many thesis are freely available in open repositories. Here in France, we have a national central system for PhD thesis

and all PhD thesis have to be submitted in a digital version since 2016. So, there is a national system and what we did was to reuse a data set from the French

bibliographic agency of higher education available on the open data platform. There were

more than 400,000 French doctoral theses from 1985 this year and we made a selection

in this data set of more than 3,400 theses based on the UNESCO Thesaurus entry terms and related concepts of the preferred term sustainable development. All this, of course,

was done in French, not in English. So, let me comment shortly on our results. The data set shows a significant evolution study increase

from less than 50 to about 200 thesis per year with a ceiling around 200.

There's a COVID effect in 2020, a slight decrease and overall there's an increase of interest on sustainable development because a part of thesis on sustainable development is increasing.

Most of them are in French but there are also theses which had been submitted in English. Our data provides information about institutions, graduate schools, and

experts. Institutions have a long tail, distribution of universities. What is perhaps more interesting is that four out of five French universities have PhD research, doctoral research

on sustainable development. The leading university is Pontian Sorbonne, especially in the field of

law. Graduate schools also have a long tail distribution with nearly 300 graduate schools all around France with some leading identified graduate schools and so on. It may be less

than a third of PhD juries. It's a Pareto distribution, 80-20. With many members and

many academic supervisors, the data shows that there is not a cluster of excellence.

Excellence means there is not a kind of team of experts working together but there's a pool of expertise. A number of people, of professors,

experts in the field of sustainable development and some of them we provide some some peer notes in our paper. Some accept kind of outstanding with a personal outstanding concern for the future of society environment in the long term and a civic public

or political commitment to sustainable developments. Rather interesting disciplines. Many disciplines are covered by these theses. The most important part is

in social science, economic law, sociology especially. Another significant domains are chemistry and biology, engineering science and management and then

geography and history. The evolution over the years,

pure science, this is a term of the new disability classification, pure science, chemistry and biology, management and sociology is increasing, decreasing, a little bit economic law and geography and stable but on a lower level

urban planning and engineering science. The data set allows also for an analysis of subject headings, the French subject headings, a derivative of the Library of

Congress subject headings can be compared. Most important of course is system development, social responsibility, biodiversity and so on. But what is interesting is to make a mapping

with the United Nations sustainable development goals and it's evident that all of these goals are covered by PhD research. You find PhD thesis linked to all of these goals.

Accessibility, nearly half of this can be accessed online which is a higher percentage than

for all French thesis over the years. The part of course is increasing from 4% to more than 70%.

Some of them are embargoed but it's a rather small part. The other can be accessed on the National Health Platform or on other platforms. We made a light analysis of thesis in preparation because the National

Portal of PhD thesis provides records of thesis in progress. There are more than

500 thesis in progress right now with the leading universities, Paris-Aclay, it's the most important research university in France now. It's a young university south of Paris and it's similar to MIT large technology campuses.

The most important disciplines of thesis in preparation are management, economics, law, geography and sociology. Again all disciplines are covered including information communication science. They're not the most important field but they are a thesis on sustainable development

with an approach especially for communication media science. I will conclude this presentation with two remarks. On the one hand our study

of course has its limitations. On the one hand the limitation is the research strategy we use UNESCO vocabulary which may produce noise which are not really

focused on sustainable development but rather on subjects in the margin of system development.

On the other hand the quality of metadata is not optimized, some metadata are missing.

We identified cataloging errors and identifiers are partly missing or not standard especially in the field of people and organizations which make scientific analysis more difficult.

Also there's a partial lack of standard classification of disciplines and subjects and of course there's a language but I said that we made the analysis in French

but there are also metadata in English but this data set is less complete, less information on English than in French. The second comment is on perspectives. Our impression is that this

data set allows for an interesting and complementary analysis of research on sustainable development. What could be done in the future is to use this data set

for a kind of expert system or research information management system. For instance based on a content analysis of the title and abstracts we didn't

this part. Also what could be done is mapping of subjects against institutions and graduate schools and of course against experts. It would mean that there would be an expert system in the field of sustainable development where you can search for institutions for

graduate schools and for experts based on subjects and concepts from the metadata and from content analysis of title and abstracts. This would be interesting. On the other hand

what could be done and we started to do it is to explore other data sets on other kinds of types of gray literature such as conference presentations, preprints, reports,

master dissertations, there's a national platform for master dissertations in France, working papers, so to identify other data sources for similar complementary scientific studies. Our data set is already available on the national research data platform and

I added here the data set we reused on the open data platform from the French government called data.goof.so.