OSDG API maps centuries worth of Swedish publications to SDGs

January 31, 2022

If you were asked about the trailblazers in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), it’s likely that Sweden would be the first to cross your mind.

According to the country’s Voluntary National Review of 2021, “the Swedish research community makes a significant contribution to implementation of the 2030 Agenda”. The report also highlights the need for research institutions, and the public and business sectors to cooperate in advancing the role of Swedish research in solving global challenges, and to help implement solutions.

Through our recent SDG-based collaboration, we hope to have contributed to Swedish research in at least a small way, keep reading to find out how.

Swedish research contributions to SDGs

Our team recently had an opportunity to apply the OSDG API (application programming interface) to Swedish Science. True to its name, Swedish Science is quite literally a vault of publications from Swedish universities and authorities dating back to as far as 1602.

As a repository of nearly 2 million publications derived from SwePub, the website allows users to filter scientific outputs based on publication date, affiliations, genres, relevant keywords, languages, and more.

Using our API to assign SDGs to research abstracts

With research abstracts readily available, we suggested making use of the OSDG API to map individual publications to the relevant SDGs. Similar to our SDG keywords mapping approach implemented with SciStarter or the UCL, the API assesses the research abstract of each publication and returns the most relevant Global Goal(s) if the text contains two or more keywords relevant for that particular SDG.

Combined with our API, the tool makes it easy to observe which sustainable development topics are prevalent among Swedish universities and higher education institutions. The labels can also be used as filters to find publications of similar themes simply by clicking on them.

"Using the OSDG.ai API to map research at swedishscience.se with the different Sustainable Development Goals enriches the user experience and understanding – it creates added value to see the research at hand in a wider context", says Ola Andersson, founder of Swedish Science.

Using our API to assign SDGs to research abstracts

While the current version of the OSDG classification tool also maps scientific outputs to SDGs, by inputting DOIs (digital object identifier), labelling text experts cover more ground and can provide more useful information to researchers. This is especially relevant for very recent publications that do not have a DOI assigned, or ones that are not yet indexed by Microsoft Academic.

“It's great to see that our approach has found its way to this impressive database of Swedish Science. Mapping scholarly publications related to the Sustainable Development Goals is how we started out, and it's great seeing our efforts applied by fellow researchers”, says Lukas Pukelis, Lead Data Scientist at OSDG.

Find the SDG footprint of your research

At OSDG, we seek to help organisations review and better understand and their research with respect to the SDGs. If you as a researcher, or as an organisation would benefit from mapping content to the Global Goals, please get in touch with our team, and we will find the best way for you to utilise our methodology - free of charge.