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Policy documents as sources for measuring societal impact: how often is climate change research mentioned in policy-related documents?

In the current UK Research Excellence Framework (REF) and the Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA), societal impact measurements are inherent parts of the national evaluation systems. In this study, we deal with a relatively new form of societal impact measurements. Recently, Altmetric—a start...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Bornmann, Lutz, Haunschild, Robin, Marx, Werner
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Springer Netherlands 2016
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5124030/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27942080
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11192-016-2115-y
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author Bornmann, Lutz
Haunschild, Robin
Marx, Werner
author_facet Bornmann, Lutz
Haunschild, Robin
Marx, Werner
author_sort Bornmann, Lutz
collection PubMed
description In the current UK Research Excellence Framework (REF) and the Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA), societal impact measurements are inherent parts of the national evaluation systems. In this study, we deal with a relatively new form of societal impact measurements. Recently, Altmetric—a start-up providing publication level metrics—started to make data for publications available which have been mentioned in policy documents. We regard this data source as an interesting possibility to specifically measure the (societal) impact of research. Using a comprehensive dataset with publications on climate change as an example, we study the usefulness of the new data source for impact measurement. Only 1.2 % (n = 2341) out of 191,276 publications on climate change in the dataset have at least one policy mention. We further reveal that papers published in Nature and Science as well as from the areas “Earth and related environmental sciences” and “Social and economic geography” are especially relevant in the policy context. Given the low coverage of the climate change literature in policy documents, this study can be only a first attempt to study this new source of altmetrics data. Further empirical studies are necessary, because mentions in policy documents are of special interest in the use of altmetrics data for measuring target-oriented the broader impact of research.
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spelling pubmed-51240302016-12-09 Policy documents as sources for measuring societal impact: how often is climate change research mentioned in policy-related documents? Bornmann, Lutz Haunschild, Robin Marx, Werner Scientometrics Article In the current UK Research Excellence Framework (REF) and the Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA), societal impact measurements are inherent parts of the national evaluation systems. In this study, we deal with a relatively new form of societal impact measurements. Recently, Altmetric—a start-up providing publication level metrics—started to make data for publications available which have been mentioned in policy documents. We regard this data source as an interesting possibility to specifically measure the (societal) impact of research. Using a comprehensive dataset with publications on climate change as an example, we study the usefulness of the new data source for impact measurement. Only 1.2 % (n = 2341) out of 191,276 publications on climate change in the dataset have at least one policy mention. We further reveal that papers published in Nature and Science as well as from the areas “Earth and related environmental sciences” and “Social and economic geography” are especially relevant in the policy context. Given the low coverage of the climate change literature in policy documents, this study can be only a first attempt to study this new source of altmetrics data. Further empirical studies are necessary, because mentions in policy documents are of special interest in the use of altmetrics data for measuring target-oriented the broader impact of research. Springer Netherlands 2016-09-09 2016 /pmc/articles/PMC5124030/ /pubmed/27942080 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11192-016-2115-y Text en © The Author(s) 2016 Open AccessThis article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.
spellingShingle Article
Bornmann, Lutz
Haunschild, Robin
Marx, Werner
Policy documents as sources for measuring societal impact: how often is climate change research mentioned in policy-related documents?
title Policy documents as sources for measuring societal impact: how often is climate change research mentioned in policy-related documents?
title_full Policy documents as sources for measuring societal impact: how often is climate change research mentioned in policy-related documents?
title_fullStr Policy documents as sources for measuring societal impact: how often is climate change research mentioned in policy-related documents?
title_full_unstemmed Policy documents as sources for measuring societal impact: how often is climate change research mentioned in policy-related documents?
title_short Policy documents as sources for measuring societal impact: how often is climate change research mentioned in policy-related documents?
title_sort policy documents as sources for measuring societal impact: how often is climate change research mentioned in policy-related documents?
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5124030/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27942080
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11192-016-2115-y
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