Robin Haunschild, Kate Williams and Lutz Bornmann
This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article, ‘The influence of public policy and administration expertise on policy: an empirical study’.
To what extent is academic expertise used in governance processes around the world? Do actors in the policy and public sector draw on research to improve their decision making? Are public administration researchers providing the public policy sector with relevant expertise for their decision making? These core questions led us to analyse the uptake of public policy and administration (PPA) research in policy documents.
Our study is based on the Overton database because it currently has the largest coverage of policy documents (broadly defined). The database makes available the meta data (e.g., title, URL, issuing organisation) of the policy documents and their cited references. Thus, we were able to connect the policy documents with the PPA research they cited using the Web of Science (WoS, Clarivate), an established resource with quality control for indexed journals. These direct citation relations provide insights into the knowledge flows from research to policymaking. We looked at 41 WoS-indexed journals that are classified under the category “Public Administration” by Clarivates’ Journal Citation Reports.
We found that the percentage of PPA publications cited at least once by a policy document has been decreasing since a high of 45% in 2005. While at first glance, this might suggest the declining utility of academic research, a more likely explanation is the sharp rise in the number of PPA publications. As the volume of research has grown, the range of objectives within the field has likely expanded, with some research focused on advancing academic knowledge and some on providing practical policy insights. Alternatively, it could be that new research takes considerable time to influence policy. This reinforces the well-established notion of a meaningful separation between academic and governance systems, which may reflect a lack of interest or a lack of opportunity — on both sides — in moving PPA research into practice.
A key finding from our study is that think tanks are more likely than government organisations to cite PPA research in their policy documents. While governments and intergovernmental organisations produce a high number of policy documents, they infrequently cite PPA papers. By contrast, think tanks produce fewer policy documents, but they are more closely related to PPA research. This aligns with the idea that think tanks often play an intermediary role, translating complex academic ideas into actionable policy recommendations. This may also be due to the nature of government institutions, which may rely more on established political processes or previous governmental reports than on academic literature when crafting policy. Moreover, governmental documents often prioritise clarity and accessibility, which likely limit the inclusion of complex academic citations.
We also looked at which academic journals were most often cited by policy documents, finding that high-impact journals, such as Public Administration Review and Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, were more frequently referenced by policymakers. This suggests that journals with greater visibility and credibility have a larger influence on policy. However, this relationship was not perfect — some journals with strong academic reputations, such as Policy and Society, were cited less frequently in policy documents. This highlights the complexity of the relationship between journal reputation and policy influence and suggests that policy actors may selectively choose sources based on relevance to specific issues, rather than simply relying on high-impact journals.
Our findings show that measuring the influence of academic expertise is not straightforward conceptually or methodologically. However, our study does provide insights into the utility of new policy databases in illuminating how academic experts can influence the ideas and actions of policy and public sector actors:
- The proportion of public policy and administration publications cited by policy documents has been decreasing since 2005, likely due to the growing volume and differing goals of the field.
- Think tanks cite public policy and administration research more often than governments, highlighting their intermediary role in translating academic work into policy.
- Policy documents tend to cite high-impact journals more often, but both academic credibility and relevance to specific issues seem to be important for policy influence.
Image credit: Photo by Markus Spiske from Unsplash
Robin Haunschild
Information Retrieval Service (IVS-CPT), Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research, Germany. Email: R.Haunschild@fkf.mpg.de
Kate Williams
School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Melbourne, Australia. Email: kate.williams@unimelb.edu.au
Lutz Bornmann
Information Retrieval Service (IVS-CPT), Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research, Germany. Email: L.Bornmann@fkf.mpg.de; Science Policy and Strategy Department, Administrative Headquarters of the Max Planck Society, Germany. Email: Lutz.Bornmann@gv.mpg.de
Read the original research in Evidence & Policy:
Haunschild, R. Williams, K. & Bornmann, L. (2025). The influence of public policy and administration expertise on policy: an empirical study. Evidence & Policy, DOI: 10.1332/17442648Y2024D000000042.
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