  The United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) challenge the
global community to build a world where no one is left behind. Recognizing that
research plays a fundamental part in supporting these goals, attempts have been
made to classify research publications according to their relevance in
supporting each of the UN's SDGs. In this paper, we outline the methodology
that we followed when mapping research articles to SDGs and which is adopted by
Times Higher Education in their Social Impact rankings. We compare our solution
with other existing queries and models mapping research papers to SDGs. We also
discuss various aspects in which the methodology can be improved and
generalized to other types of content apart from research articles. The results
presented in this paper are the outcome of the SDG Research Mapping Initiative
that was established as a partnership between the University of Southern
Denmark, the Aurora European Universities Alliance (represented by Vrije
Universiteit Amsterdam), the University of Auckland, and Elsevier to bring
together broad expertise and share best practices on identifying research
contributions to UN's Sustainable Development Goals.
