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

policy citations of papers (n = 2,071,085) that were cited by policy documents at least once is 0.16. The correlation coefficient is slightly higher (0.20) between Scopus citations and policy citations of papers (n = 102,372) that were cited by climate change policy documents at least once. However, climate change papers that are cited in climate change policy documents received significantly more citations (between 3.3 and 5.6 times) on average than climate change papers that are not cited in these documents (see Fig 8). Fig 9 includes the journal perspective to show the correlation between the number of cli- mate change policy document citations and Scopus citations. The Spearman rank correlation between both citation counts is high at 0.81. The results in the figure point out that some Fig 7. Number of papers with at least one policy citation grouped by CiteScore quartile of the journal. In the first journal quartile, e.g., are those journals that belong to the 25% of the journals with the highest CiteScore in their subject areas. For about 7% of the journals, a CiteScore was not available. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0274693.g007 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 12 / 24