Sustainability practices in higher education institutions: international bibliographic research - 2012 to 2021

Abstract

In a context where concern for the environment must increasingly permeate the different areas of our society, Higher Education Institutions are also called to play their roles in teaching, research, extension and operations, contributing to sustainable development in their campus, in the region where it operates and at a global level. From this perspective, this article aimed to analyze the international bibliographic production of sustainability practices carried out by universities, seeking to understand the characteristics of publications on the subject. The methodology used was exploratory-descriptive, based on a bibliometric study using the Web of Science database from 2012 to 2021 with the keywords “sustainability practices” AND “higher education institutions”. After a filtering step, 242 articles were found. To analyze the results, the Clarivate Analytics tool was used, available in the database itself, seeking to know the research areas, languages, countries, journals, authors and years of publication with the largest publications on the subject covered. In addition to these criteria, the H Factor (H-index) of the result presented in the survey was identified as equal to 28, representing the publications with the greatest impact. The years 2019 and 2020 were the record holders for publications and the Journal of Cleaner Production and International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education magazines were those with the most articles. The publication with the highest number of citations was “Beyond the third mission: Exploring the emerging university function of co-creation for sustainability” by the authors Trencher et al. (2014).