How do the results of our research, education and engagement relate to the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and how does the SDG relatedness of our results compare to other schools? Faculty, learners and evaluators in universities and business schools are increasingly asking these questions.
This dashboard is developed by Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University (RSM) and aims to experiment with meaningful analytics and different metrics on the SDGs.
The main aim of the dashboard is to stimulate dialogue among peers and institutional leaders and to help universities and business schools develop a better strategic understanding of SDG relatedness and to stimulate the design of data driven & evidence-based impact narratives.
We started developing the SDG mapping technology in 2018, mapping the research and education of RSM. As we noticed that mapping academic outcomes to SDGs was emerging and new technology was needed to do this in a systematic way and scalable to multiple collections and full text works.
For the development of the RSM SDG mapper, our custom-made Machine Learning model, we used open data and open-source technology where possible.
AI technology was developed, trained and validated in partnership with Dialogic to facilitate large scale mapping. We applied an Open Science approach. The model is based on a State-of-the-Art algorithm developed by Google (namely, Google's BERT). We fine-tuned and validated this model on very large open datasets like the Springer Nature SciGraph, an open dataset with over 7 million publication abstracts. We labeled this dataset with search queries for every SDG using a compilation of many keyword per SDG. The development is explained in the methodology section (link). The Software we developed is made available as open source through Github (link).
The dashboard contains 2 collections; collections related to the research and education of RSM and collections that support benchmarking between institutions on research, education and impact. Some collections are mapped on the full text documents (PhD Theses and MSc Theses), other collections use meta data like abstracts, titles and keywords (articles, teaching cases and impact cases).
We appreciate feedback to further develop the method and technology used.
Please contact Wilfred Mijnhardt, Policy Director RSM for further inquiries on the dashboard.
Note 1: The methodology and the analytics and metrics published on this dashboard is intended to be used for non-commercial purposes, like institutional learning, strategic dialogues. The dashboard is updated on a regular base with new mappings and collections.
Note 2: We are very proud that Erasmus University Rotterdam has also launched a sustainability monitoring dashboard using our SDG mapping technology.
The SDG mapper dashboard of Erasmus University is open access here.
