The study’s methodological approach to searching for regional publications contains a significant flaw. The authors relied on a single, overly narrow search string for each region, such as “sustainable development in Americas”.
This specific phrasing would only capture a tiny fraction of the relevant literature, missing all articles that use more common regional descriptors like:
“Sustainable development in Latin America”
“Sustainable development in North America”
“Sustainable development in South America”
Or even country-specific terms like “sustainable development in Brazil” or
“sustainable development in the united states”
I tested this on Scopus through a quick search. Using just these five phrases, I found 110 articles; a number drastically higher than the 17 publications for the entire Americas reported in the study.
This indicates that the reported disparities in regional publication numbers are likely not a true reflection of scholarly output but an artifact of an incomplete search strategy. This fundamental data collection issue potentially compromises the study’s core comparative findings and conclusions.