A Review of French PhD Theses on Sustainable Development

The dataset was produced for a scientometric study on French PhD theses in the field of sustainable development, presented at the Twenty-Fifth International Conference on Grey Literature "Confronting Climate Change with Trusted Grey Resources", OBA Congres, November 13-14, 2023, Oosterdokskade, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. We reused a dataset with metadata of 431,997 theses ("Thèses soutenues en France depuis 1985") produced by ABES and available as public open data at the following address: https://www.data.gouv.fr/fr/datasets/theses-soutenues-en-france-depuis-1985/ The ABES dataset was downloaded in csv format on August 16, 2023. Our dataset is a subsample of the ABES dataset; it contains 3,467 theses which represent 0.8% of the total number of theses in the ABES file.

The purpose of the study is to assess the French PhD theses on sustainable development, with two objectives: to give a scientometric overview on the French PhD landscape in the field of sustainable development; and to show how PhD theses (as a major part of grey literature) and related tools can be helpful for the scientometric study of science. The review is based on data from the French national portal theses.fr. The results of our study provide a detailed review of the French PhD research on sustainable development from 1985 to 2022, including the main French research universities in the field of sustainable development and the most eminent academic scholars, the disciplinary distribution of the research on sustainable development, and the accessibility of the PhD theses on sustainable development (open science). The analysis of the year of defense will allow a longitudinal approach to these aspects. The dataset contains personal data from theses.fr