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

investigated the time between appearance of the policy document and its cited scientific papers. This difference is on average 5.8 years for climate change policy documents and 6.7 years for all policy documents. Both differences are significantly shorter than the average refer- ences ages in scientific papers and correspond to the results by Yin, Gao [11]. Fig 5 shows the proportions of accumulated citations of scientific papers in climate change policy documents over time. These proportions are compared with the proportions in all pol- icy documents. We expected that climate change policy documents cite more recently pub- lished papers than other policy documents because of the great societal relevance of the topic. The results in Fig 5 show that this is indeed the case: The distribution for climate change policy documents increases faster than the distribution that refers to all policy documents. Yin, Gao [11] found a similar result for COVID-19 policy documents–another topic with high societal relevance. We expected that policy documents preferentially cite papers published in reputable jour- nals. The most valuable papers can be expected to be published in these journals. The results by Yin, Gao [11] show, for example, that “COVID-19 policy documents disproportionately reference peer-reviewed insights, drawing especially heavily on top medical journals, both gen- eral (such as Lancet) and specialized (such as Clinical Infectious Diseases)” (p. 129). In this study, we used CiteScore as the indicator for measuring reputation. Fig 6 shows the correlation

between number of policy document citations received by papers in various scientific journals and the CiteScore of these journals. With a Spearman rank correlation coefficient of 0.24 (on the journal level), the relationship between journal reputation and policy citations is quite low. Fig 5. Proportion of accumulated citations of scientific papers in (climate change) policy documents over time. The publication year differences are the time between publication year of the policy document and publication year of the scientific paper. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0274693.g005 PLOS ONE How relevant is climate change research for climate change policy? PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0274693 September 22, 2022 10 / 24