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

important for the policy area (since they were frequently cited). Fig 4 shows the document types of the publications cited by climate change policy documents. In order to facilitate the interpretation of the results, the results for all policy documents have been added. We have aggregated “article in progress” with “article”. The type “other” contains empty document type entries, “abstract”, and “missing”. The results in the figure show that most policy documents reference “articles”, followed by “reviews” and “conference papers”. The other document types play a minor role. The referencing behavior seems rather similar in policy documents in gen- eral and in policy documents that are related to climate change. Yin, Gao [11] found that “the COVID-19 policy frontier appears to be deeply grounded in extremely recent, peer-reviewed scientific insights” (p. 129). We expect there to be a similarly short time lag for climate change research on the one hand; but we can imagine a “classics” effect that certain foundational papers are referred to over and over again on the other hand (some of the policy documents might actually reiterate outdated findings/outliers as well). For Fig 2. Percentage of (climate change) policy documents per sector. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0274693.g002 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 8 / 24