Influential scientists shape knowledge flows between science and IGO policy

2025-06-07

AI Summary

The opaque pathways through which scientific research informs intergovernmental organization (IGO) policy hinder evidence-informed global governance. This study addresses the lack of systematic understanding of scientists with demonstrable policy impact (PI-Scis) and their cross-disciplinary, transnational influence patterns. Method: Leveraging a corpus of over 230,000 scholarly articles cited in IGO policy documents, we integrate bibliometrics, author name disambiguation, collaboration network modeling, and multi-source data linkage to identify and characterize PI-Scis. Contribution/Results: We provide the first large-scale empirical characterization of PI-Scis’ structural properties, temporal evolution, and the “publish-and-be-cited-in-policy” cumulative advantage mechanism. PI-Scis are highly concentrated within elite, interconnected networks—serving as knowledge brokers in advisory bodies such as the IPCC. Disciplinary variation in influence concentration is pronounced, and knowledge diffusion across major IGOS exhibits strong synchronicity. These findings establish a foundational empirical basis and methodological framework for analyzing the global science–policy interface.

Technology Category

• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Graph Mining, Social Network Analysis & Community
• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Optimization of Spatio-temporal Systems

Application Category

• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Interdisciplinary science discovery with web data mining
• Social Networks and Social Media: Computational social science
• Security and Privacy: Data transparency and provenance

Abstract

Intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) increasingly rely on scientific evidence, yet the pathways through which scientific research enters policy remain opaque. By linking 230,737 scientific papers cited in IGO policy documents (2015-2023) to their authors and collaboration networks, we identify a small group of policy-influential scientists (PI-Sci) who dominate this knowledge flow. These scientists form tightly interconnected, internationally spanning co-authorship networks and achieve policy citations shortly after publication, a distinctive feature of cumulative advantage at the science-policy interface. The concentration of influence varies by field: tightly clustered in established domains like climate modeling, and more dispersed in emerging areas like AI governance. Many PI-Sci serve on high-level advisory bodies (e.g., IPCC), and major IGOs frequently co-cite the same PI-Sci papers, indicating synchronized knowledge diffusion through shared expert networks. These findings reveal how network structure and elite brokerage shape the translation of research into global policy, highlighting opportunities to broaden the scope of knowledge that informs policy.

Problem

• Identify influential scientists shaping IGO policy knowledge flows
• Analyze concentration of influence across scientific fields
• Examine network structures enabling elite policy-science brokerage

Innovation

• Linking scientific papers to policy citations
• Identifying policy-influential scientists networks
• Analyzing field-specific influence concentration patterns