The Citedness of Animal Welfare Research in Policy Using the Overton Database

The field of animal welfare research has grown rapidly over the last 20 years [1]. Although it has been possible to analyze the citation performance of these research works within academia either to understand their scientific significance or for evaluation purposes (and measure the “academic impact”), conducting similar analyses beyond academia has proven to be much more difficult until recently. Nevertheless, demonstrating the “societal impact” of research—its relevance and use beyond academia, particularly in policy—has become increasingly important for researchers. Altmetrics tools have emerged to track how research is cited in non-academic spheres such as news outlets, social media, and policy documents.

This commentary highlights the citedness of peer reviewed animal welfare research in policy. Although this analysis provides insights into citation patterns of the research, further research is needed to contextualize why those outputs got cited by policymakers.

Overton is a trusted and comprehensive full text policy document database. These documents produced by government bodies, intergovernmental organizations (IGOs), health agencies, and think tanks are linked to the academic research they cite. Overton also tracks policy to policy citations enabling deeper analysis of how ideas propagate within the policymaking process.

A policy document in Overton is defined “as a publication written by or primarily for policymakers.” This definition intends to be broad in order to capture any publications aimed at policymakers.

The database covers documents from over 190 countries and more than 100 IGOs, but there are some geographical disparities due to the availability of the policy documents. Overton only captures policy documents which are available online and this means that the numbers and locations of policy documents in Overton show a bias toward knowledge economies and other countries with a stronger productivity and online presence. Additionally, its coverage of policy documents is strongest from 2015 onward, with 79% of its documents published after 2012.

The commentary analyzed animal welfare research published between 2003 and 2022, using OpenAlex to identify 9315 primary articles. Of these, 4060 had Digital Object Identifier (DOI) bearing in mind that some of the author affiliation data were missing for 19% of DOIs.

Five hundred and fifty-eight of those DOIs (14%) were cited by at least one policy document according to Overton. Interestingly, the 2021 Pinheiro study suggested that less than 6% of academic outputs get referenced in policy documents (this percentage tends to fluctuate depending on the research area and also the age of the cited research which has more time to accrue citations) [2]. This would indicate that animal welfare is relatively well-represented in policy discussions.

Overall, the citation distribution is skewed with nearly half (48%) of the cited articles being referred by one policy document only, whereas only 9% of the cited research sit among the 10% most cited publications (i.e., those with more than 10 policy citations in this specific set regardless of their publication year).

Of the most frequently cited articles, 67% were published before 2013 (echoing Pinheiro findings). Additionally, 60% of these highly cited research appeared in the open access EFSA Journal which publishes the scientific outputs of the European Food Safety Authority (upon requests from the EU Commission), bringing to light that policymakers often cite their own work.

To single out policy documents that have cited research findings authored by research organizations only, DOIs published by EFSA were removed (which were mostly cited by EFSA along other EU institutions) from the analysis. After this adjustment, 703 policy documents were found to have cited 514 DOIs. The citing documents were respectively produced by IGOs, followed by EU institutions, national governments, and think tanks in 17 languages (75% were written in English) as detailed in Figure 1.

Preliminary data reveal a regional bias, with EU institutions and EU national governments citing animal welfare research more frequently than other national governments, indicating that animal welfare research is a more prominent policy issue within the Eurozone compared to other parts of the world. Further semantic analyses would need to be conducted to uncover the main topics of these citing policy documents. It is also notable that policy documents produced by IGOs tend to have received greater number of citations from other policy documents.

The number of policy documents citing animal welfare research has increased steadily from 2017 to 2022. This correlates with a rise of produced cited outputs since 2019, indicating that animal welfare research, including some newer works, has been gaining momentum in the policy sphere. Since 2023, the number of citing documents has dropped. This should be viewed cautiously, as Overton is still collecting policy outputs for recent years and the data is not mature yet for assessment purposes.

Overton assigns thematic topics to policy documents, reflecting their central themes. In this analysis, 1109 topics were extracted. By filtering for those assigned more than 100 times (Table 1), we can identify that certain topics appeared “more frequently than expected.” Overton detects those topics that come up unusually frequently by applying an algorithm detecting a significant increase compared with the base set.

Overton provides a valuable tool for understanding the policy landscape around animal welfare, tracking where and how research is being used in policy. It serves as a data source that connects research findings to citations and mentions in policy documents, making these interactions more transparent. Still, this commentary emphasizes that the analysis is limited to the research currently indexed by Overton and does not capture all animal welfare publications cited in policy over time. Moreover, policymakers are not always consistent in citing or mentioning academic research, which may result in gaps in the evidence base used in policy decisions.

Although this brief commentary sheds some light on the citation patterns of animal welfare in policy, more in-depth studies would need to be conducted to contextualize policy citations and evaluate their true value. For researchers in the field of animal welfare willing to engage with government experts, think tanks, and IGOs, Overton can help them enhance the reach of their research in policy and understand how it contributes to policy discussions and shape future policy directions.

Nathalie Cornee: conceptualization, investigation, writing – original draft, methodology, visualization, formal analysis, project administration, resources, data curation, writing – review and editing, validation.

The author declares no conflicts of interest.