Boston University
AC-9: Research and Scholarship

The sustainability research inventory was conducted primarily through a survey sent to faculty in November of 2023. The survey collected published research potentially related to sustainability, as defined by AASHE with supporting documentation from the Earth Charter and the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), that was conducted by BU faculty in Fiscal Year 2023. The survey results were then reviewed by the BU Sustainability Analyst and validated for accuracy, according to the aforementioned sustainability guidelines. Authors were verified by Institutional Research with the list of BU Faculty who conduct research to ensure only BU Affiliates are included in reporting, and duplicates were removed.

This represents FY2023 BU Metrics.

In PRE-5, we reported 198 for the "number of academic departments(or the equivalent)", meaning there are 198 departments with at least one faculty. Overall, the number of departments that conduct research is different from the number of academic departments. To get to 100 - if an employee has a "research" flag from the HR SAP file, then they're regarded as a "research employee" and we counted the number of Master Cost Centers of those departments who have such a flag. In previous years, we only reported on the number of faculty with a "research" flag from the HR SAP file, which was around 600 faculty members.

This year, in better alignment with the STARS technical manual, our "number of employees that are engaged in research" includes all faculty and staff for whom scholarly/creative work is a requirement for promotion, and thus is significantly larger. Employees conducting research that do not require research in consideration for promotion are excluded from both the Numerator and Denominator.