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

One reason for the low correlation might be that Citescore values at the top of the distribu- tion are very spread out. If one were to use journal ranks rather than using Citescore, the coef- ficient would likely be much higher. In fact, this is the argument made in Fig 7. We found that scientific literature cited in policy documents is frequently published in high-impact journals: 69.31% of the papers with at least one policy citation were published in first-quartile journals. Thus, one can expect that policy citations of scientific papers correlate with citations of these papers in the scientific literature. The results by Yin, Gao [11] for COVID-19 policy documents show that “the coronavirus research used by policy-makers aligns with what scientists heavily engage with themselves” (p. 129). In this study, the Spearman rank correlation coefficient between Scopus citations and Fig 6. Correlation between number of climate change policy document citations received by papers in various scientific journals and number of Scopus papers published in these journals (Spearman rank correlation = 0.24; an interactive version can be viewed at: https://s.gwdg.de/k9Wp07). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0274693.g006 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 11 / 24