Policy citations of scientometric articles: an altmetric study

Policy citations are considered as one of the important indicators of the societal impact of research. Scientometrics is a field that, among other goals, focus on contributing to science policy, so the presence of scientometric researches in policy documents become important. Accordingly, this study aims to measure the impact of scientometric researches on policy by examining the mentions of scientometric articles in policy documents. The dataset used in this study includes 5525 scientometric articles indexed in Web of Science between 2013 and 2022. The Overton database were used to collect policy citations. The results showed that out of 5525 scientometric articles, 921 articles (16.67%) were cited at least once in policy documents. Additionally, older articles were cited more frequently than recent ones in policy documents. Scientometrics Journal ranked first in terms of the number of articles being cited in policy documents, while Research Policy and Research Evaluation Journals ranked first and second, respectively, in terms of coverage, density, and intensity. Subject analysis of the cited articles in policy documents showed that articles on national/international scholar collaborations, scholar productivity/scholar performance, and funding and sponsorship were cited more frequently in policy documents. Finally, Open Access articles were cited more frequently than non-open access articles in policy documents. However, there was not significant difference between policy citations of multi-authored and sing-authored articles. Overall, policy citations of scientometric articles were fair compared to other fields, and for greater impact of this field on policy, publishing open access, and greater attention to the topics identified in this study can be helpful.