---
title: "SDG 3 Good health and well-being: research papers"
description: "From 2017 to 2026 (so far), SDG 3 (Good health and well-being) was addressed by 31,750 papers in the tracked journals, most of them in health economics and policy (11,023), AI (7,806) and economics (5,355). It is #3 of the 17 goals by papers from 2023 to 2025 (11,925)."
url: https://scholar4ai.com/sdgs/3-good-health-and-well-being
markdown_url: https://scholar4ai.com/sdgs/3-good-health-and-well-being.md
license: CC BY-NC 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)
share_text: "From 2017 to 2026 (so far), SDG 3 (Good health and well-being) was addressed by 31,750 papers in the tracked journals, most of them in health economics and policy (11,023), AI (7,806) and economics (5,355). (as of 2026-10-31)"
data_url: https://scholar4ai.com/data/rankings.json
updated: 2026-10-31T17:45:59+09:00
window: 2026-10-02 to 2026-10-31
source: OpenAlex (CC0)
---

# SDG 3: Good health and well-being

Papers in the tracked journals on UN Sustainable Development Goal 3, Good health and well-being. OpenAlex assigns a paper to each UN Sustainable Development Goal that its classifier scores above 0.4 from the paper's text; a paper can belong to several goals or to none.

All 17 goals: https://scholar4ai.com/rankings/sdgs.md

## Key findings

- From 2017 to 2026 (so far), SDG 3 (Good health and well-being) was addressed by 31,750 papers in the tracked journals, most of them in health economics and policy (11,023), AI (7,806) and economics (5,355).
- It is #3 of the 17 goals by papers from 2023 to 2025 (11,925).
- 4,474 of them were published in 2025, against 1,672 in 2017.
- Since 2023, the institutions with the most of these papers were University of Oxford (169), The University of Sydney (168) and Erasmus University Rotterdam (162).
- The journals publishing most of them were Expert Systems with Applications (1,265), Neural Computing and Applications (754) and Health Policy (636).
- The most-cited of them is “From local explanations to global understanding with explainable AI for trees” (Nature Machine Intelligence, 2020), with 10,493 citations.

## Papers per year

*Papers per publication year and category*

| Category | 2017 | 2018 | 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 | 2026 (so far) |
|---|---:|---:|---:|---:|---:|---:|---:|---:|---:|---:|
| [Health Economics and Policy](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/health-economics-and-policy.md) | 847 | 947 | 968 | 1,070 | 1,231 | 1,090 | 1,069 | 1,196 | 1,374 | 1,231 |
| [AI](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/ai.md) | 163 | 255 | 289 | 474 | 770 | 903 | 985 | 1,128 | 1,529 | 1,310 |
| [Economics](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/economics.md) | 271 | 338 | 352 | 544 | 757 | 683 | 612 | 626 | 669 | 503 |
| [Operations Research](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/operations-research.md) | 137 | 163 | 186 | 187 | 303 | 384 | 351 | 330 | 312 | 275 |
| [Management](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/management.md) | 60 | 69 | 69 | 108 | 192 | 161 | 164 | 113 | 144 | 107 |
| [Information Systems](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/information-systems.md) | 66 | 54 | 63 | 80 | 102 | 114 | 115 | 110 | 105 | 104 |
| [Statistics](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/statistics.md) | 51 | 81 | 72 | 61 | 99 | 100 | 89 | 85 | 104 | 114 |
| [Tourism and Hospitality](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/tourism-and-hospitality.md) | 31 | 43 | 44 | 89 | 138 | 108 | 82 | 79 | 80 | 65 |
| [Finance](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/finance.md) | 14 | 14 | 18 | 53 | 90 | 68 | 69 | 81 | 70 | 56 |
| [Marketing](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/marketing.md) | 15 | 18 | 26 | 30 | 46 | 46 | 52 | 34 | 37 | 46 |
| [Higher Education and Research](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/higher-education-and-research.md) | 15 | 18 | 21 | 31 | 42 | 39 | 34 | 39 | 48 | 30 |
| [Accounting](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/accounting.md) | 2 | 1 | 1 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 3 | 5 | 2 | 3 |
| All categories | 1,672 | 2,001 | 2,109 | 2,729 | 3,772 | 3,698 | 3,625 | 3,826 | 4,474 | 3,844 |

## Where the papers come from

*Journals with the most papers, since 2023*

| # | Journal | Papers |
|---:|---|---:|
| 1 | [Expert Systems with Applications](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/expert-systems-with-applications.md) | 1,265 |
| 2 | [Neural Computing and Applications](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/neural-computing-and-applications.md) | 754 |
| 3 | [Health Policy](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/health-policy.md) | 636 |
| 4 | [Health Research Policy and Systems](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/health-research-policy-and-systems.md) | 530 |
| 5 | [Knowledge-Based Systems](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/knowledge-based-systems.md) | 431 |
| 6 | [Health Economics Review](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/health-economics-review.md) | 425 |
| 7 | [Cost Effectiveness and Resource Allocation](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/cost-effectiveness-and-resource-allocation.md) | 417 |
| 8 | [The European Journal of Health Economics](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/the-european-journal-of-health-economics.md) | 411 |
| 9 | [Health Policy and Technology](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/health-policy-and-technology.md) | 399 |
| 10 | [PharmacoEconomics](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/pharmacoeconomics.md) | 397 |

*Institutions with the most papers, since 2023*

| # | Institution | Papers |
|---:|---|---:|
| 1 | University of Oxford | 169 |
| 2 | The University of Sydney | 168 |
| 3 | Erasmus University Rotterdam | 162 |
| 4 | [Peking University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/peking-university.md) | 158 |
| 5 | [Chinese Academy of Sciences](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/chinese-academy-of-sciences.md) | 156 |
| 6 | The University of Melbourne | 156 |
| 7 | University of Toronto | 156 |
| 8 | Monash University | 155 |
| 9 | Harvard University | 150 |
| 10 | [Sichuan University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/sichuan-university.md) | 150 |

*Countries with the most papers, since 2023*

| # | Country | Papers |
|---:|---|---:|
| 1 | China | 4,161 |
| 2 | United States | 3,205 |
| 3 | United Kingdom | 1,966 |
| 4 | Australia | 1,103 |
| 5 | India | 1,089 |
| 6 | Germany | 877 |
| 7 | Italy | 826 |
| 8 | Canada | 791 |
| 9 | Netherlands | 664 |
| 10 | Spain | 571 |

*Keywords with the most papers, since 2023*

| # | Keyword | Papers |
|---:|---|---:|
| 1 | [COVID-19 pandemic](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/covid-19-pandemic.md) | 1,503 |
| 2 | [cost-effectiveness](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/cost-effectiveness.md) | 727 |
| 3 | quality-adjusted life years | 482 |
| 4 | [China](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/china.md) | 434 |
| 5 | health care costs | 430 |
| 6 | older adults | 410 |
| 7 | gender differences | 333 |
| 8 | mental health | 318 |
| 9 | health technology assessment | 280 |
| 10 | [class imbalance](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/class-imbalance.md) | 256 |

## Most-cited papers

*Most-cited papers since 2017*

| # | Citations | Per month | Title | Journal | Published | Authors |
|---:|---:|---:|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 10,493 | 128.8 | [From local explanations to global understanding with explainable AI for trees](https://doi.org/10.1038/s42256-019-0138-9) | [Nature Machine Intelligence](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/nature-machine-intelligence.md) | 2020-01-17 | Scott Lundberg, Gabriel Erion, Hugh Chen et al. |
| 2 | 2,517 | 34.8 | [A Survey on Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI): Toward Medical XAI](https://doi.org/10.1109/tnnls.2020.3027314) | [IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ieee-transactions-on-neural-networks-and-learning-systems.md) | 2020-10-21 | Erico Tjoa, Cuntai Guan |
| 3 | 1,747 | 19.8 | [Big data in healthcare: management, analysis and future prospects](https://doi.org/10.1186/s40537-019-0217-0) | [Journal Of Big Data](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/journal-of-big-data.md) | 2019-06-19 | Sabyasachi Dash, Sushil Kumar Shakyawar, Mohit Sharma et al. |
| 4 | 1,490 | 19.4 | [Secure, privacy-preserving and federated machine learning in medical imaging](https://doi.org/10.1038/s42256-020-0186-1) | [Nature Machine Intelligence](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/nature-machine-intelligence.md) | 2020-06-08 | Georgios A. Kaissis, Marcus R. Makowski, Daniel Rückert et al. |
| 5 | 1,436 | 18.2 | [Death and contagious infectious diseases: Impact of the COVID-19 virus on stock market returns](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbef.2020.100326) | [Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Finance](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/journal-of-behavioral-and-experimental-finance.md) | 2020-04-08 | Abdullah M. Al-Awadhi, Abdullah M. Al-Awadhi, Khaled Alsaifi et al. |
| 6 | 1,403 | 11.9 | [Psychological safety: A systematic review of the literature](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.hrmr.2017.01.001) | [Human Resource Management Review](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/human-resource-management-review.md) | 2017-01-16 | Alexander Newman, Ross Donohue, Nathan Eva |
| 7 | 1,302 | 16.8 | [An interpretable mortality prediction model for COVID-19 patients](https://doi.org/10.1038/s42256-020-0180-7) | [Nature Machine Intelligence](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/nature-machine-intelligence.md) | 2020-05-14 | Yan Li, Hai‐Tao Zhang, Jorge M. Gonçalves et al. |
| 8 | 1,254 | 16.2 | [Stock markets’ reaction to COVID-19: Cases or fatalities?](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ribaf.2020.101249) | [Research in International Business and Finance](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/research-in-international-business-and-finance.md) | 2020-05-22 | Badar Nadeem Ashraf |
| 9 | 1,188 | 10.2 | [EQ-5D and the EuroQol Group: Past, Present and Future](https://doi.org/10.1007/s40258-017-0310-5) | [Applied Health Economics and Health Policy](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/applied-health-economics-and-health-policy.md) | 2017-02-13 | Nancy J. Devlin, Richard G. Brooks |
| 10 | 1,179 | 10.2 | [Work organization and mental health problems in PhD students](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.respol.2017.02.008) | [Research Policy](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/research-policy.md) | 2017-03-13 | Katia Levecque, Frederik Anseel, Alain De Beuckelaer et al. |

## Cite this page

Scholar4AI. (2026). SDG 3: Good health and well-being. Journal Research Rankings. Retrieved October 31, 2026, from https://scholar4ai.com/sdgs/3-good-health-and-well-being

```bibtex
@misc{scholar4ai-sdgs-3-good-health-and-well-being,
  author = {{Scholar4AI}},
  title = {SDG 3: Good health and well-being},
  year = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://scholar4ai.com/sdgs/3-good-health-and-well-being}},
  urldate = {2026-10-31},
  note = {Journal Research Rankings; data from OpenAlex (CC0); licensed CC BY-NC 4.0}
}
```

License: CC BY-NC 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).