How relevant is climate change research for climate change policy? An empirical analysis based on Overton data

RESEARCH ARTICLE How relevant is climate change research for climate change policy? An empirical analysis based on Overton data Lutz BornmannID1,2*, Robin Haunschild2, Kevin BoyackID3, Werner Marx2, Jan C. Minx4 1 Science Policy and Strategy Department, Administrative Headquarters of the Max Planck Society, Munich, Germany, 2 Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research, Stuttgart, Germany, 3 SciTech Strategies, Inc., Albuquerque, NM, United States of America, 4 Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change (MCC), Berlin, Germany * bornmann@gv.mpg.de Abstract Climate change is an ongoing topic in nearly all areas of society since many years. A discus- sion of climate change without referring to scientific results is not imaginable. This is espe- cially the case for policies since action on the macro scale is required to avoid costly consequences for society. In this study, we deal with the question of how research on cli- mate change and policy are connected. In 2019, the new Overton database of policy docu- ments was released including links to research papers that are cited by policy documents. The use of results and recommendations from research on climate change might be reflected in citations of scientific papers in policy documents. Although we suspect a lot of uncertainty related to the coverage of policy documents in Overton, there seems to be an impact of international climate policy cycles on policy document publication. We observe local peaks in climate policy documents around major decisions in international climate

diplomacy. Our results point out that IGOs and think tanks–with a focus on climate change– have published more climate change policy documents than expected. We found that cli- mate change papers that are cited in climate change policy documents received significantly more citations on average than climate change papers that are not cited in these docu- ments. Both areas of society (science and policy) focus on similar climate change research fields: biology, earth sciences, engineering, and disease sciences. Based on these and other empirical results in this study, we propose a simple model of policy impact considering a chain of different document types: The chain starts with scientific assessment reports (systematic reviews) that lead via science communication documents (policy briefs, policy reports or plain language summaries) and government reports to legislative documents. Introduction People have long believed that nature is so vast and powerful that mankind has not the poten- tial for any major and lasting effect on the earth’s climatic system. One century ago, Arrhenius PLOS ONE PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0274693 September 22, 2022 1 / 24 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 OPEN ACCESS Citation: Bornmann L, Haunschild R, Boyack K, Marx W, Minx JC (2022) How relevant is climate change research for climate change policy? An empirical analysis based on Overton data. PLoS ONE 17(9): e0274693. https://doi.org/10.1371/ journal.pone.0274693 Editor: Alberto Baccini, University of Siena, Italy, ITALY Received: March 21, 2022

Accepted: September 1, 2022 Published: September 22, 2022 Copyright: © 2022 Bornmann et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Data Availability Statement: The data underlying the results presented in the study are available from https://doi.org/10.17617/3.DUY0LD. Funding: The author(s) received no specific funding for this work. Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.