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

We differentiated the results in Table 2 further by specifically looking at government, IGO, and think tank sources: We show policy sources in Table 3 that cite science for governments, IGOs, and think tanks. Yin, Gao [11] reveal the results of similar analyses based on COVID-19 datasets. The results show that governments and IGOs are of similar importance, both with regard to the overall number of policy documents and climate change related policy docu- ments. The top ranked think tanks produced about half of the overall number of policy docu- ments compared to the top ranked governmental organizations and IGOs. Their share of climate change research related documents is roughly the same. Table 1. Policy sources with the highest number of policy documents (sorted by the number of 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). Policy source Number of policy documents Number of cited scientific papers Number of cited climate change papers (number of citing policy documents) Publications Office of the European Union 33,096 279,161 13,601 (863) World Health Organization 23,993 268,872 2,213 (109) World Bank 19,476 169,787 15,402 (699) National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) 16,766 119,655 1,124 (69) U.S. Government Publishing Office 14,910 231,200 10,003 (108) IZA Institute of Labor Economics 13,849 115,195 738 (22) Government of Canada 12,275 151,426 6,542 (196)

Analysis & Policy Observatory 9,806 145,875 16,897 (508) Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) 9,179 156,840 458 (20) https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0274693.t001 Table 2. Policy sources with the largest number of climate change papers cited. The table shows policy sources that cited more than 4.000 papers. Policy source Number of papers cited IPCC 54,251 Analysis & Policy Observatory 38,529 Publications Office of the European Union 32,352 World Bank 28,156 U.S. Government Publishing Office 24,623 United Nations Environment Programme 20,029 International Union for Conservation of Nature 16,451 Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations 15,438 Heartland Institute 12,914 Joint Research Centre 11,164 Arctic Council 9,288 Government of Canada 9,165 PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency 7,151 Committee for Economic Development of Australia 6,325 World Health Organization 5,008 GOV.UK 4,725 Umwelt Bundesamt 4,478 Asian Development Bank 4,462 New Zealand Ministry for Primary Industries 4,422 https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0274693.t002 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 17 / 24