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the ten research papers that policy documents cite most

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G7 leaders gather for a photo at the Itsukushima Shrine during the G7 Summit in Hiroshima, Japan in 2023

Policymakers often work behind closed doors — but the documents they produce offer clues about the research that influences them.Credit: Stefan Rousseau/Getty

When David Autor co-wrote a paper on how computerization affects job skill demands more than 20 years ago, a journal took 18 months to consider it — only to reject it after review. He went on to submit it to The Quarterly Journal of Economics, which eventually published the work1 in November 2003.

Autor’s paper is now the third most cited in policy documents worldwide, according to an analysis of data provided exclusively to Nature. It has accumulated around 1,100 citations in policy documents, show figures from the London-based firm Overton (see ‘The most-cited papers in policy’), which maintains a database of more than 12 million policy documents, think-tank papers, white papers and guidelines.

“I thought it was destined to be quite an obscure paper,” recalls Autor, a public-policy scholar and economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. “I’m excited that a lot of people are citing it.”

The top ten most cited papers in policy documents are dominated by economics research. When economics studies are excluded, a 1997 Nature paper2 about Earth’s ecosystem services and natural capital is second on the list, with more than 900 policy citations. The paper has also garnered more than 32,000 references from other studies, according to Google Scholar. Other highly cited non-economics studies include works on planetary boundaries, sustainable foods and the future of employment (see ‘Most-cited papers — excluding economics research’).

These lists provide insight into the types of research that politicians pay attention to, but policy citations don’t necessarily imply impact or influence, and Overton’s database has a bias towards documents published in English.

Interdisciplinary impact

Overton usually charges a licence fee to access its citation data. But last year, the firm worked with the London-based publisher Sage to release a free web-based tool that allows any researcher to find out how many times policy documents have cited their papers or mention their names. Overton and Sage said they created the tool, called Sage Policy Profiles, to help researchers to demonstrate the impact or influence their work might be having on policy. This can be useful for researchers during promotion or tenure interviews and in grant applications.

Autor thinks his study stands out because his paper was different from what other economists were writing at the time. It suggested that ‘middle-skill’ work, typically done in offices or factories by people who haven’t attended university, was going to be largely automated, leaving workers with either highly skilled jobs or manual work. “It has stood the test of time,” he says, “and it got people to focus on what I think is the right problem.” That topic is just as relevant today, Autor says, especially with the rise of artificial intelligence.

Walter Willett, an epidemiologist and food scientist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston, Massachusetts, thinks that interdisciplinary teams are most likely to gain a lot of policy citations. He co-authored a paper on the list of most cited non-economics studies: a 2019 work3 that was part of a Lancet commission to investigate how to feed the global population a healthy and environmentally sustainable diet by 2050 and has accumulated more than 600 policy citations.

“I think it had an impact because it was clearly a multidisciplinary effort,” says Willett. The work was co-authored by 37 scientists from 17 countries. The team included researchers from disciplines including food science, health metrics, climate change, ecology and evolution and bioethics. “None of us could have done this on our own. It really did require working with people outside our fields.”

Sverker Sörlin, an environmental historian at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, agrees that papers with a diverse set of authors often attract more policy citations. “It’s the combined effect that is often the key to getting more influence,” he says.

Sörlin co-authored two papers in the list of top ten non-economics papers. One of those is a 2015 Science paper4 on planetary boundaries — a concept defining the environmental limits in which humanity can develop and thrive — which has attracted more than 750 policy citations. Sörlin thinks one reason it has been popular is that it’s a sequel to a 2009 Nature paper5 he co-authored on the same topic, which has been cited by policy documents 575 times.

Although policy citations don’t necessarily imply influence, Willett has seen evidence that his paper is prompting changes in policy. He points to Denmark as an example, noting that the nation is reformatting its dietary guidelines in line with the study’s recommendations. “I certainly can’t say that this document is the only thing that’s changing their guidelines,” he says. But “this gave it the support and credibility that allowed them to go forward”.

Broad brush

Peter Gluckman, who was the chief science adviser to the prime minister of New Zealand between 2009 and 2018, is not surprised by the lists. He expects policymakers to refer to broad-brush papers rather than those reporting on incremental advances in a field.

Gluckman, a paediatrician and biomedical scientist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, notes that it’s important to consider the context in which papers are being cited, because studies reporting controversial findings sometimes attract many citations. He also warns that the list is probably not comprehensive: many policy papers are not easily accessible to tools such as Overton, which uses text mining to compile data, and so will not be included in the database.

“The thing that worries me most is the age of the papers that are involved,” Gluckman says. “Does that tell us something about just the way the analysis is done or that relatively few papers get heavily used in policymaking?”

Gluckman says it’s strange that some recent work on climate change, food security, social cohesion and similar areas hasn’t made it to the non-economics list. “Maybe it’s just because they’re not being referred to,” he says, or perhaps that work is cited, in turn, in the broad-scope papers that are most heavily referenced in policy documents.

As for Sage Policy Profiles, Gluckman says it’s always useful to get an idea of which studies are attracting attention from policymakers, but he notes that studies often take years to influence policy. “Yet the average academic is trying to make a claim here and now that their current work is having an impact,” he adds. “So there’s a disconnect there.”

Willett thinks policy citations are probably more important than scholarly citations in other papers. “In the end, we don’t want this to just sit on an academic shelf.”

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Will the Gates Foundation’s preprint-centric policy help open access?

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The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, one of the world’s top biomedical research funders, will from next year require grant holders to make their research publicly available as preprints, articles that haven’t yet been accepted by a journal or gone through peer review. The foundation also said it would stop paying for article-processing charges (APCs) — fees imposed by some journal publishers to make scientific articles freely available online for all readers, a system known as open access (OA).

The Gates Foundation is the first major science funder to take such an approach with preprints, says Lisa Hinchliffe, a librarian and academic at the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign. The policies — which take effect on 1 January 2025 — elevate the role of preprints and are aimed at reducing the money the Gates Foundation spends on APCs, while ensuring that the research is free to read.

But the policy’s ramifications are unclear. “Whether this will help the open-access movement or not, it’s hard to know,” Hinchliffe says. On the one hand, more research will become freely available in preprint form, she notes. On the other, the final published versions of articles, known as the version of record, might become harder to access. Under the revised rules, after sharing their manuscript as a preprint, authors will be allowed to submit it to the journal of their choice and will no longer be required to select the OA option.

“Our decision is driven by our goals of immediate access to research, global reuse and equitable action,” says Ashley Farley, programme officer of knowledge and research services at the Gates Foundation in Seattle, Washington. Grant recipients will still be required to post their preprints under a licence that allows their contents to be reused, she says. The foundation plans to publish the full policy within the next couple of weeks.

OA efforts

The Gates Foundation announced in 2015 that it would require its grant recipients to make their research articles freely available at the time of publication by placing them in open repositories. It later joined cOAlition S — a group of mainly European research funders and organizations supporting OA academic publishing — and endorsed the group’s Plan S, by which funders mandate that grant holders publish their work through an OA route.

Butthe Gates Foundation’s latest policy puts it on course to diverge from the group. It is not “entirely in line with cOAlition S”, says Johan Rooryck, executive director of the coalition, who is based in Leiden, the Netherlands. Whereas cOAlition S requires either an accepted manuscript or the version of record to be available OA, he says, “the Gates Foundation is clearly of the opinion that the preprint is sufficient”. He notes that the group allows for “a lot of leeway in policies” between its members, adding that the Gates policy continues to uphold key aspects of Plan S, such as promoting authors’ retention of rights to their accepted manuscripts.

The coalition has been examining the role of preprints in OA, but it’s a long way from adopting any related policy changes, Rooryck says. A document released by the group last year discussed the issue, and the coalition is gathering feedback from the research community through a survey open until 22 April. No decisions will be made on adopting any proposal before the end of the year.

Another difference between Plan S and the Gates policy is their stance on APCs. “Ending support for APC payments is not the cOAlition S policy, I can be very clear about that,” Rooryck says. “That’s a decision that Gates has taken. It’s not a decision that we, as cOAlition S, are ready to make by 1 January 2025.”

Ending support for APCs is a “very sensible plan” given the unsustainable increase of such charges in recent years, says Lynn Kamerlin, a computational biophysicist at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. “The Gates Foundation plan is the open-access plan I would have liked to see when Plan S was announced.”

Juan Pablo Alperin, a scholarly-communications researcher at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, notes that APCs are “inherently an unjust way” of supporting OA. “Stopping support for APCs sends a signal to the larger community, including the community of funders, that this mechanism is not a way forward,” he says.

Effects on publishing

It’s hard to predict the effects of the Gates policy on scientific publishing, says Hinchliffe. Some grant holders might find it harder to publish in OA journals, and rely more on preprints to disseminate their work. But others might continue to publish through OA journal routes, especially if they have other funding sources to cover the APCs, or if their institutions’ libraries have agreements with publishers to reduce the costs of OA publishing.

Although the Gates Foundation is a big funder — with a budget of US$8.6 billion in 2024 — it still funds only a modest percentage of the world’s research, Hinchliffe notes, and it’s not clear whether other funders will follow suit. Some, even among those that require OA publishing, already refuse to cover APCs.

Another potential consequence of the policy is that there might be a difference in the quality of a manuscript freely available as a preprint and its final version behind a paywall. In certain cases, people with access to the final version are going to be in a better position to avoid particular kinds of mistake than are those who rely solely on the preprint, Hinchliffe says. Kamerlin notes that an increasing number of preprint publishers allow authors to update their preprints as many times as necessary, which could ease that concern.

Farley says that there is growing evidence that errors in early versions of preprints are addressed quickly, “as there is a much broader pool of researchers to read and evaluate the preprint”. The foundation will provide grant recipients with a list of recommended preprint servers “that have demonstrated a level of checks that ensure the scientific validity of research”, she adds. It has also invested in a new preprint service called VeriXiv, “which will set new standards for preprint checking”.

Some authors might well choose not to publish formally in journals, deciding that the preprint is enough, says Alperin. “I don’t see that as being a problem in itself,” he says. “Sometimes, the goal of a journal publication has been a negative force in science, encouraging people to focus on publishing in a particular journal when the goal should really be to do high-quality research and to ensure that it is communicated and that it reaches the right audience.”

Publishers contacted by Nature’s news team said they are still assessing the Gates policy. (Nature’s news team is editorially independent of its publisher, Springer Nature.) “We are reviewing the implications of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s new open-access policy and what it means for how we support their researchers,” said a spokesperson for the publisher Elsevier in a statement.

Roheena Anand, executive director of global publishing development and sales at the publisher PLOS, which is based in San Francisco, California, said in a statement that PLOS has already recognized that the APC model of OA publishing creates inequities. “We are committed to finding sustainable and equitable alternatives. That’s why we have launched several non-APC models and are also working with a multi-stakeholder working group,” she says, “to identify more equitable routes to knowledge-sharing beyond article-based charges.” She added that there is a risk that, without established alternatives, researchers funded by the Gates Foundation will revert to publishing their work behind paywalls. “PLOS’s newer business models offer one possible alternative.”

In an article announcing the changes, Estee Torok, a senior programme officer at the Gates Foundation, wrote that the organization has paid around $6 million in APCs per year since 2015. “We’ve become convinced that this money could be better spent elsewhere to accelerate progress for people,” she wrote. Farley says that the foundation plans to invest in more equitable OA models, such as ‘diamond OA’, a system in which publishers don’t charge fees to authors or readers, as well as preprint servers and other platforms and technologies for research dissemination.

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Pence claims that in reaction to the Pentagon’s abortion policy, he ‘commends’ senators delaying military nominees.

Former Vice President Mike Pence said that Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville is fighting for the rights of “tens of millions of pro-life, tax-paying Americans.”
Former Vice President Mike Pence, who is running for the GOP presidential nomination in 2024, said he is proud of U.S. Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., for stopping hundreds of military jobs in response to the Pentagon’s controversial abortion policy, which was announced earlier this year.

Because former defense secretaries have criticized Tuberville’s position on the matter, the host of a NewsNation town hall in Chicago on Wednesday night asked Pence if he should resign.

The former vice president, who is very against abortion, said, “No.” “The Pentagon needs to stop.”
Pence said that he is pro-life and doesn’t feel bad about it. He then asked why public money is being used to “undermine pro-life laws in states across the country.” He said it is “just wrong” to think that “liberal Democratic agenda” generals at the Pentagon are using the money to attack state laws.
Pence said, “I applaud Sen. Tuberville, and instead of asking him to stop, I’d ask the Pentagon to stop.” “If I’m President of the United States, I promise we’ll get rid of all this woke stuff at the Pentagon.”

In its official plan, which came out on February 16, the Pentagon said it would pay for the trip of service members who want an abortion or want to go with a partner who wants to end a pregnancy. It said that troops would have up to five months, or 20 weeks into their pregnancy, to tell their offices and request travel to get an abortion.

“The DOD health care provider will place the service member who is considering an abortion in a medical temporary nondeployable status without regard to the service member’s pregnancy status, until appropriate medical care and the necessary recovery time are complete,” the memo said.

The letter also tells the military units that people who want to get an abortion or fertility treatments that aren’t covered by military health care providers can take an administrative leave without losing pay.
Pence continued to criticize the policy by saying that, if elected, he would make sure that the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff focused on the mission of the US military, “which is readiness and making sure they can defend this nation and our interests around the world.”

He also said that Tuberville is fighting for the rights of “tens of millions of pro-life, tax-paying Americans” who are “happy to invest in our national defense” but do not want the military to use public money to promote a “liberal social agenda.”

When asked what he would do if a Democratic senator held up military raises to promote a “woke” cause, Pence said he would take it to the American people and “see what they think about that.”
Usually, both parties in the U.S. Senate have to agree on military bids and awards. But Tuberville’s general hold broke this rule, and defense officials and members of both parties criticized him for putting national security at risk.

Tuberville has said that he won’t move until Democrats let the idea be voted on. The Senate could move forward by voting on each name separately, but Democrats say that would tie up the floor for months and that giving in would make it more likely that similar things will happen again in the future.

The Pentagon says that the move has already stopped more than 260 nominations of senior officers in all five branches. By the end of the year, that number could reach as high as 650.

Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder said earlier this week that the Pentagon was not paying for abortions, but was instead “giving all of our service members equal reproductive health care.”
“The Department does not pay for abortions,” said Ryder. “What this does is make it easier for a service member to get to places they could have gotten to before.”

He also said, “If you are now sent to a state where these services are not available, we will not pay for them.” But we will get you to a place where you can pay for those services, just like we would if you were stationed overseas.”

Ryder said the Pentagon didn’t want a force with “haves and have-nots,” where some people have access and others don’t just because of where the military puts them.