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

of East Anglia with its long-lasting tradition in climate change research and meteorology at the top. It is noteworthy that throughout Tables 2 to 4, we find institutions that are alleged to focus on climate misinformation according to the Climate Disinformation Database (https://www. desmog.com/climate-disinformation-database/) like the Heartland Institute, the Foundation for Economic Education, the Heritage Foundation, and Acton Institute; those are very active publishers of policy documents. The Acton Institute also features among the most prolific think thanks publishing policy documents related to climate change. In the overall climate change dataset, we found 17 policy organizations that are listed in the Climate Disinformation Database. The organizations produced 99 policy documents (that cited any Scopus paper) within our dataset; these documents cited 6507 Scopus papers. That is 1.4% of the policy docu- ments and 4.1% of the cited Scopus papers in our dataset. Discussion The use of results and recommendations from research on climate change might be reflected in citations of scientific papers in policy documents. Studies analyzing the impact of research on policy belong to the area of societal impact measurements in scientometrics [13]. Accord- ing to Vilkins and Grant [18], “capturing this impact on policy has significant potential bene- fits, including showing the impact of research on real-world settings, and building a better case for support for researchers and institutions or even broader research directions” (p. 1682). For

Yin, Gao [11] policy-science citations may occur “for different reasons . . . including (i) instru- mental uses (knowledge directly applied to solve problems); (ii) conceptual uses (research influences or informs the way policymakers think); (iii) tactical uses (citing research to support Table 4. Scientific institutions with the highest number of papers cited in policy documents. The table includes all institutions with more than 2000 papers cited. Science institution Number of papers cited University of East Anglia 3,917 Wageningen University & Research 3,892 Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research 3,828 University of Oxford 3,716 National Center for Atmospheric Research 3,602 Stanford University 3,475 University of California, Berkeley 3,142 Columbia University 2,993 Harvard University 2,956 University of Washington 2,925 International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis 2,868 Met Office 2,800 ETH Zurich 2,682 Princeton University 2,549 Australian National University 2,429 Joint Research Centre 2,308 Utrecht University 2,278 University of British Columbia 2,163 VU Amsterdam 2,155 University College London 2,087 University of Queensland 2,044 https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0274693.t004 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 19 / 24