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

(2000–2010) suffer from small number effects relative to the most recent decade. Climate change policy documents cite different fields than the whole. The large shifts shown in Yin, Gao [11] aren’t seen here, but COVID-19 is a rather unique situation where social concerns followed after the medical ones on a short time scale. Scientific institutions and policy sources involved in political climate change discussions In the final section of the empirical results, we focus on the scientific institutions and policy sources that are involved in the political climate change discussions. We are interested in the policy sources that are very active in political climate change discussions (and decisions) and science institutions that provide research results as inputs for the discussions. Table 1 shows the policy sources with the highest number of climate change policy documents. The table also reveals the number of scientific papers cited by these institutions and the number of climate change papers (the number in brackets is the number of policy documents citing the climate change papers). The results show that Publications Office of the European Union and World Bank are the institutions with the most climate change policy documents. According to Euan Adie (founder and director of Overton) the Publications Office of the European Union is a special case as it aggregates documents from many different EU agencies. Cross-regional insti- tutions such as European Union and World Bank are best-suited for dealing with global issues

and thus are focused on major problems such as global warming. Table 2 focuses on policy sources that are rooted in climate change research. The results in the table reveal that IPCC is the source that referenced the largest number of papers. Consider- ing the large amount of scientific information collected and presented in the various IPCC reports over many years, this is not surprising as the assessment of the scientific literature on climate change is its core mandate. Fig 11. Fields of papers cited in policy documents (an interactive version with all ASJC27 fields is available at: https://s.gwdg.de/ QTl1nm). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0274693.g011 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 16 / 24