Supplementary material - Political Legacies and Sustainability Education: A Bibliometric Analysis of Education for Sustainable Development Research in Higher Education
Description
The supplementary materials provided in the repository support the transparency, reproducibility and robustness of the bibliometric analysis conducted in the manuscript “Political Legacies and Sustainability Education: A Bibliometric Analysis of Education for Sustainable Development Research in Higher Education.” The repository includes: (1) the full search strings used to retrieve data from Web of Science and Scopus databases, detailing all keywords, Boolean operators and filtering criteria applied, thereby enabling replication of the data collection process; (2) a .txt file containing the complete database of publications associated with higher education institutions from EU countries without a communist political legacy; and (3) a .txt file containing the corresponding database of publications from EU countries with an ex-communist political history. Both datasets consist of bibliographic records exported from the selected databases and structured according to the criteria described in the methodology, allowing direct comparison between the two corpora. Together, these materials ensure full access to the underlying data and methodological design of the study, facilitating reproducibility, transparency and further research on sustainability education and the influence of political legacies on academic knowledge production.
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Steps to reproduce
The data was collected from the Web of Science and Scopus databases, as these databases are multidisciplinary databases that are commonly used for bibliometric research due to their comprehensive disciplinary scope, structured metadata and ability to facilitate the application of network analysis tools. Search strategy and corpus construction: a single, structured and reproducible search strategy was used to identify relevant literature. The search was performed in November 2025 using Web of Science and Scopus, targeting titles, abstracts and author keywords. The search string was designed to incorporate both dominant and emerging conceptualizations of sustainability-oriented education, with clear links to higher education and pedagogy. The search string consisted of three blocks combined with Boolean operators (which can be found in the document Search strings). To enable comparative analysis, the core query was combined with a country filter, based on the historical political system of the European Union (EU) member states, as inferred from author affiliation countries recorded in Web of Science and Scopus. Countries were grouped into two analytical categories: EU member states with a communist or socialist one-party political system prior to democratic transition and EU member states without such a political history, encompassing liberal democracies, mixed political systems and other non-communist regimes.
Institutions
- Babeș-Bolyai UniversityCluj County, Cluj-Napoca