text2sdg: An R package to Monitor Sustainable Development Goals from Text

Abstract: 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.