Mapping EU-Funded Research to the Sustainable Development Goals: A Transparent, Vocabulary-Grounded Methodology and Its Empirical Validation
This report presents a complete, reproducible methodology for linking EU-funded research projects recorded in the Community Research and Development Information Service (CORDIS) to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as defined by the official EU Vocabularies SDG taxonomy (`http://data.europa.eu/sdg`).
The central design principle is explainability: every assignment is grounded in explicit, auditable evidence drawn from authoritative controlled vocabularies, and is accompanied by the matched terms, the source field, the specific SDG concept (down to target level where justified), and a calibrated confidence estimate.
The method was executed over the full combined Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe corpus (58,840 unique projects). Of these, 34,622 (58.8%) were mapped to at least one SDG concept, 29,657 (50.4%) at confident level and 27,309 (46.4%) at strong level, yielding 58,609 assignment rows.