SDG 7: Affordable and clean energy

Papers in the tracked journals on UN Sustainable Development Goal 7, Affordable and clean energy. 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. Also as Markdown.

← All 17 goals · SDG 1 · SDG 2 · SDG 3 · SDG 4 · SDG 5 · SDG 6 · SDG 7 · SDG 8 · SDG 9 · SDG 10 · SDG 11 · SDG 12 · SDG 13 · SDG 14 · SDG 15 · SDG 16 · SDG 17

Key findings#

From 2017 to 2026 (so far), SDG 7 (Affordable and clean energy) was addressed by 15,029 papers in the tracked journals, most of them in economics (9,781), operations research (2,317) and AI (1,737).
It is #8 of the 17 goals by papers from 2023 to 2025 (5,496).
2,156 of them were published in 2025, against 1,157 in 2017.
Since 2023, the institutions with the most of these papers were Xiamen University (105), Hong Kong Polytechnic University (96) and Beijing Institute of Technology (94).
The journals publishing most of them were Energy Policy (1,502), Energy Economics (1,348) and Expert Systems with Applications (527).
The most-cited of them is “Digitalization and energy: How does internet development affect China's energy consumption?” (Energy Economics, 2021), with 933 citations.

Papers per year#

20172026 (so far)

Papers per publication year and category
Category	2017	2018	2019	2020	2021	2022	2023	2024	2025	2026 (so far)
Economics	905	951	911	947	887	877	935	1,033	1,226	1,109
Operations Research	156	158	159	159	198	229	246	275	371	366
AI	58	63	79	82	135	214	249	275	346	236
Management	20	32	31	36	67	90	77	77	56	57
Finance	7	11	13	19	37	31	59	98	145	123
Information Systems	3	2	4	8	6	6	1	3	4	5
Marketing	1	1	0	2	3	1	0	7	1	3
Tourism and Hospitality	2	1	1	3	2	1	2	1	0	3
Higher Education and Research	4	2	0	2	1	0	0	0	1	2
Statistics	0	0	0	0	0	1	1	0	4	3
Health Economics and Policy	1	1	0	0	3	0	0	0	1	0
Accounting	0	1	0	0	0	0	0	1	1	1
All categories	1,157	1,223	1,198	1,258	1,339	1,450	1,570	1,770	2,156	1,908

Where the papers come from#

Journals with the most papers, since 2023
#	Journal	Papers
1	Energy Policy	1,502
2	Energy Economics	1,348
3	Expert Systems with Applications	527
4	Utilities Policy	456
5	Neural Computing and Applications	207
6	Computers & Industrial Engineering	192
7	Economic Analysis and Policy	157
8	Technological Forecasting and Social Change	131
9	Transportation Research Part E Logistics and Transportation Review	119
10	European Journal of Operational Research	113

Institutions with the most papers, since 2023
#	Institution	Papers
1	Xiamen University	105
2	Hong Kong Polytechnic University	96
3	Beijing Institute of Technology	94
4	Xi'an Jiaotong University	94
5	Tsinghua University	87
6	Lebanese American University	86
7	Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique	83
8	Renmin University of China	81
9	Norwegian University of Science and Technology	71
10	North China Electric Power University	69

Countries with the most papers, since 2023
#	Country	Papers
1	China	2,720
2	United States	944
3	United Kingdom	662
4	Germany	465
5	Australia	439
6	France	391
7	India	370
8	Italy	342
9	Spain	289
10	Turkey	259

Keywords with the most papers, since 2023
#	Keyword	Papers
1	energy transition	730
2	China	543
3	energy efficiency	395
4	renewable energy	382
5	energy security	304
6	CO2 emissions	284
7	energy poverty	265
8	energy policy	255
9	decarbonization	248
10	renewable energy integration	211

Most-cited papers#

Most-cited papers since 2017
#	Citations	Per month	Title	Journal	Published	Authors
1	933	13.8	Digitalization and energy: How does internet development affect China's energy consumption?	Energy Economics	2021-03-18	Siyu Ren, Yu Hao, Lu Xu et al.
2	880	11.7	How do environmental regulation and environmental decentralization affect green total factor energy efficiency: Evidence from China	Energy Economics	2020-07-24	Haitao Wu, Yu Hao, Siyu Ren
3	868	7.7	Politicizing energy justice and energy system transitions: Fossil fuel divestment and a “just transition”	Energy Policy	2017-06-27	Noel Healy, John Barry
4	834	7.2	New frontiers and conceptual frameworks for energy justice	Energy Policy	2017-03-18	Benjamin Kenneth Sovacool, Matthew J. Burke, Lucy Baker et al.
5	792	9.9	Predicting the state of charge and health of batteries using data-driven machine learning	Nature Machine Intelligence	2020-03-02	Man‐Fai Ng, Jin Cai Zhao, Qingyu Yan et al.
6	768	9.0	Institutional quality, green innovation and energy efficiency	Energy Policy	2019-09-27	Huaping Sun, Bless Kofi Edziah, Chuanwang Sun et al.
7	758	7.0	Accurate photovoltaic power forecasting models using deep LSTM-RNN	Neural Computing and Applications	2017-10-14	Mohamed Abdel‐Nasser, Karar Mahmoud
8	751	8.3	The way to induce private participation in green finance and investment	Finance research letters	2019-04-08	Farhad Taghizadeh Hesary, Naoyuki Yoshino
9	716	7.6	How much does financial development contribute to renewable energy growth and upgrading of energy structure in China?	Energy Policy	2019-01-08	Qiang Ji, Dayong Zhang
10	703	6.2	Financing renewable energy: Who is financing what and why it matters	Technological Forecasting and Social Change	2017-06-08	Mariana Mazzucato, Gregor Semieniuk

Cite this page

Scholar4AI. (2026). SDG 7: Affordable and clean energy. Journal Research Rankings. Retrieved October 31, 2026, from https://scholar4ai.com/sdgs/7-affordable-and-clean-energy

@misc{scholar4ai-sdgs-7-affordable-and-clean-energy,
  author = {{Scholar4AI}},
  title = {SDG 7: Affordable and clean energy},
  year = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://scholar4ai.com/sdgs/7-affordable-and-clean-energy}},
  urldate = {2026-10-31},
  note = {Journal Research Rankings; data from OpenAlex (CC0); licensed CC BY-NC 4.0}
}

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