Sustainable Development Goals in Psychology: A Century of Progress in Publications

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) offer a lens for tracking societal change, yet contributions from the social and behavioral sciences have rarely been integrated into policy agendas. To take stock and create a baseline and benchmark for the future, we assemble 233,061 psychology publications (1894 -- 2022) and tag them to the 17 SDGs using a query-based classifier. Health, education, work, inequality, and gender dominate the study of SDGs in psychology, shifting from an early focus on work to education and inequality, and since the 1960s, health. United States-based research leads across most goals. Other countries set distinct priorities (e.g., China: education and work; Australia: health). Women comprise about one-third of authors, concentrated in social and health goals, but have been underrepresented in STEM-oriented goals. The 2015 launch of the SDGs marked a turning point: SDG-tagged publications have been receiving more citations than comparable non-SDG work, reversing a pre-2015 deficit. Tracking the SDGs through psychology clarifies long-run engagement with social priorities, identifies evidence gaps, and guides priorities to accelerate the field's contribution to the SDG agenda.