Mapping research articles to Sustainable Development Goals

Yury Kashnitsky, Guillaume Roberge, Jingwen Mu, Kevin Kang, Maurice Vanderfeesten, Robert Jaworek, Maéva Vignes, Finne Boonen, Bamini Jayabalasingham, Chris James, Isabelle Labrosse, Marius Doornenbal and Maxime Rivest

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals challenge the global community to build a world where no one is left behind. Recognizing that research plays a fundamental part in supporting these goals, attempts have been made to classify research publications according to their relevance in supporting each of the UN SDGs. In this paper, we outline the methodology that we followed when mapping research articles to SDGs and which is adopted by Times Higher Education in their University Impact rankings. We also discuss various aspects in which the methodology can be improved and generalized to other types of content apart from research articles.