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

themselves. In this context, Isett and Hicks [48] speak about knowledge intermediaries in doc- ument chains. Future research could attempt measuring the impact on policy along such a document chain. As citations would be expected to fade away as you move down the chain, it will become increasingly relevant to use text mining or other methods from natural language processing (e.g., text similarity approaches; argumentation mining) to measure impact. Finally, as primary studies are very dependent on their specific research design, data and methods applied, there is a widespread argument that policy should be informed by the most robust scientific evidence and as such be built from secondary research (reviews) whenever possible [49]. Therefore, future scientometric research may explore to what extent primary and secondary research is used in policy documents and how this varies across different sectors. Acknowledgments The bibliometric data used in this paper are from an in-house database developed and main- tained by SciTech Strategies, Inc. derived from Scopus, prepared by Elsevier BV (Amsterdam, The Netherlands). The policy document data were shared with us by Overton on December 04, 2020. Author Contributions Conceptualization: Lutz Bornmann, Robin Haunschild, Werner Marx, Jan C. Minx. Data curation: Robin Haunschild, Kevin Boyack. Formal analysis: Robin Haunschild, Kevin Boyack. Investigation: Robin Haunschild, Kevin Boyack. Methodology: Lutz Bornmann, Robin Haunschild, Kevin Boyack. Supervision: Jan C. Minx. Visualization: Kevin Boyack.

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How relevant is climate change research for climate change policy? PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0274693 September 22, 2022 22 / 24