An international research team led by INGENIO (CSIC-UPV) and the Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information (KISTI) has started a new project to analyse how scientific evidence is used in policymaking.
The project brings together researchers Adrián A. Díaz-Faes and Rebecca Marjoram (INGENIO), along with Jinseo Park, Jungwoo Lee, and Donggyu Kim (KISTI), in a collaboration that combines expertise in data science, the science of science, and social studies of science. KISTI will lead the processing of paper-policy datasets and development of the data infrastructure, and INGENIO will provide conceptual and methodological expertise related to policy analysis.
The main objective is to move beyond traditional metrics and better understand how scientific knowledge is incorporated into policy documents. Rather than focusing on citation counts alone, the project aims to examine how academic literature is used: whether it supports specific decisions, helps frame policy problems, or serves as a general reference within policy discourse.
To do so, the team will use the Overton database, which compiles millions of policy documents and their references to academic publications. The researchers are developing a classification system to identify different types of research use through content analysis combined with large language models. This combination of qualitative methods and computational tools will help shed light on how scientific knowledge is taken up and used in policymaking.
