Science 4 SDs Visual Essay

To better understand how science, technology and innovation efforts are thematically related to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), SIRIS Academic developed a novel methodology to identify SDG-related texts and classify them into the first 16 SDGs.

SIRS Academic developed a website demonstrating an application of this methodology: we have classified the textual descriptions of all research and innovation (R&I) projects financed by the European Commission under the 7th Framework Programme (FP7) and Horizon 2020 (H2020) into the SDGs, and developed a set of visualisations exploring the temporal evolution and the country specialisation of SDG-related efforts.

We identified the most distinctive and frequent words in the project’s titles and descriptions. The colour palette represents words that are relatively more (less) frequent in Horizon 2020 versus the 7th Framework Programme.

We also looked at how do different countries specialise their research and innovation on the SDGs.

Also showing how countries can be grouped according to their research and innovation portfolio on the SDGs

We analysed how research and innovation interests evolve, by presenting the evolution of the most frequent SDG-related words found in the titles and descriptions of all the R&I projects, organized by Goal. This provides a view of the specific topics of interest of the policy instruments and of the funded projects, and how these terms evolve through time.

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