NWB2023_Policy citing Science: A study of references in Swedish governmental reports (SOUs)

This study analyses references in Swedish governmental reports, known as Statens offentliga utredningar (SOUs). We suggest that tracing references to scholarly publications may be a potential method for studying the policy impact of research. Combining a manual analysis with machine reading of documents, we offer a first systematic study of citation patterns in Swedish governmental reports. The analysis shows that a large share of the references cited in the policy reports are written in Swedish, and many could be described as being part of the “gray literature”. This indicates that scholars seeking to influence policy may need to explore alternative publication channels beyond peer-reviewed articles in English-language journals. Moreover, some government areas are prone to use scholarly literature extensively, while scholarliness is a less salient characteristic in others. Overall, the method of studying references in policy documents appears promising. Yet, the lack of an agreed-upon format of references (reference lists or footnotes) is a significant concern when applying our approach on a larger scale. Further implications of our findings are discussed concerning recent ideas on knowledge brokering as a theoretical concept for understanding how research is taken up in a policy sphere.