text2sdg: An R package to Monitor Sustainable Development Goals from Text
This tool addresses the need for accessible SDG monitoring across various text sources for academic and non-academic organizations, but it is incremental as it builds on existing query systems.
The researchers tackled the problem of monitoring Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) from text by developing an R package called text2sdg, which detects SDGs in any text data using existing or custom query systems, facilitating broader monitoring and validation of methods.
Monitoring progress on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is important for both academic and non-academic organizations. Existing approaches to monitoring SDGs have focused on specific data types; namely, publications listed in proprietary research databases. We present the text2sdg package for the R language, a user-friendly, open-source package that detects SDGs in any kind of text data using different existing or custom-made query systems. The text2sdg package thereby facilitates the monitoring of SDGs for a wide array of text sources and provides a much-needed basis for validating and improving extant methods to detect SDGs from text.