NWB2023_An Investigation of policy citations to Nordic scientific publication

This research investigates sources of policy citations to Nordic scientific publications within the Overton platform. Various non-academic entities, such as government bodies, international organizations, healthcare institutions, statistical agencies, and news agencies, produce a wide range of grey literature, i.e., scientific literature produced by organizations outside of traditional academic publishing. These documents often aim to apply scientific findings to real-life practices. However, not all grey literature citing scientific papers are used by policy makers or integrated into policy-making processes. The primary objective of this paper is to identify and categorize the sources and contexts of the citing documents identified in Overton. Furthermore, this study seeks to determine the prevalence of policy citations to scientific publications published in the Nordic countries. To achieve these goals, a dataset of 93,378 Scopus publications with DOIs, affiliated with the five Nordic countries, i.e., Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Norway, and Iceland, and the autonomous territories of Faroe island and Greenland, and the autonomous region of Åland, will be examined. Preliminary findings indicate that approximately 10% of scientific publications in Finland and up to 23% in Greenland have at least one policy citation in Overton. A sample of policy citations, covering publications from different areas, will be manually categorized to investigate the evidence of policy application. This research will increase our understanding of the use of scientific research in policy-making processes within the Nordic region. The findings will contribute to a deeper understanding of the dynamics between academic publications and policy-relevance in non-academic grey literature, thereby facilitating evidence-informed decision-making.