This Keeping Up project explores strategies for addressing the question: How do I keep up with new developments in sustainability science? Its target audience is both experienced sustainability scholars and new entrants to the field.

The body of research work in the field of sustainability science is growing fast, doubling every five years or so. The field is also expanding to engage an ever-wider range of disciplines, schools of thought, research programs, and regions. Overall, this is great news: an increasing number of scholars from around the world is drawing on an increasing range of research perspectives and thereby increasing the store of knowledge that society has available for its pursuit of sustainability. But there is also a downside. For individual researchers, students, funders, and users, the rapidly expanding depth and breadth of the field poses profound challenges of keeping up. 

Strategic approaches are needed to meet these challenges. Useful strategies will almost certainly acknowledge on the one hand the limited bandwidth all of us have to locate and digest even a fraction of the most important new work in the field, and on the other hand the costs of remaining unaware of that work and how it might complement our own. Devising, discussing, and improving such strategies is the purpose of this “Keeping Up” project.

We reported some of our own research on keeping up strategies in the Supplemental Materials for the Research Guide project located elsewhere on this site. We plan to draw from that research initial contributions to the Keeping Up project on each of the topics listed below. Once these contributions are posted, we will—as elsewhere on this site—welcome others in the community to annotate them, extend them, and download the results for their own use. 

• What are the most useful journals for keeping up with new work across the full spectrum of sustainability sciences?

• What are useful search strategies and journals for keeping up with new work in specific research programs within the broader field of sustainability science?

• What are the most useful websites for keeping up with new work across the full spectrum of sustainability sciences?

• What are the most active organizations (universities, research centers) conducting significant work across a broad spectrum of sustainability sciences?

• What are some of the most interesting new publications in the field?

We invite readers to suggest additional topics that could usefully be addressed in the project by contacting us through the link here.

^{Banner image credit: FAO Aquaculture by Lionel Dabbadie}