Uncovering the science-policy interface: applying bibliographic approaches to the wildfire risk management domain

The impact of research is increasingly gaining importance as science is understood as a means to solve the challenges of humanity. Therefore, processes of interaction between science and policy makers are needed, namely Science-Policy Interface (SPI). But who is actually participating in SPIs? This question is relevant since scientific findings can be subject to interpretation, might contradict each other or can be driven by normative frameworks. Additionally, complex challenges require the involvement of all relevant disciplines and if certain disciplines are not heard, policies might as well only address parts of the problem. To unpack respective processes, this paper explores the opportunities of bibliography to trace and track science-policy interactions applying it to the field of wildfire risk management (WFRM). An analysis of bibliometric data provided by Dimensions was carried out. Therefore, the development of the numbers of publications and policy documents over time as well as the numbers of publications and policy documents in different fields of research (FoR) are considered. Furthermore, the Altmetrics of publications which are cited in policy documents are compared to the total of publications with reference to WFRM. It can be stated that the number of publications with reference to WFRM follows the general trend of an increasing publication rate. Individual deviations from the general trend can be attributed to extraordinary wildfire events. The number of policy documents with reference to WFRM seems to correlate more strongly with the number of scientific publications with reference to WFRM than to the general trend in the number of policy documents. In addition, indicators for delay of 6 to 7 years in knowledge uptake from science to policy were found. Regarding the FoRs, three clusters of were identified. While two of these clusters indicate a positive correlation between the number of publications in a FoR and the number of citations, one cluster of FoR has low numbers of citations in policy documents while the number of publications is high. That leads to the conclusion, that there are bias respective unknown impact factors which affect whether or not a policy maker considers a particular FoR. One impact factor seems to be the attention a publication receives in scientific but also non-scientific communities. The Altmetric Scores of publications with citations in policy documents are double as high as the Altmetric Scores of the total of publications with reference to WFRM. By analysing the composition of the Altmetric Scores of cited publications respective the Altmetric Donuts, it could be found that the vast majority of publications that are cited in policy documents did receive attention in social media, especially twitter. Another result of the analysis is, that the data quality concerning the links between policy documents and publications is insufficient. However, the bias found in the SPI demonstrate the usefulness of this bibliometric approach. With increasing reliability of bibliometric databases, the methodology presented in this paper can be applied broadly as a tool to analyse SPIs and help to create transparency on the integration of scientific findings into policy processes.