Measuring the societal impact of research: references to climate change research in relevant policy literature

A new metric offers insight into the societal impact of scholarly research by tracking the mentions of academic publications in policy documents. Lutz Bornmann, Robin Haunschild and Werner Marx have studied the usefulness of this metric, taking climate change research as their example, and found only a low percentage of papers were referenced in the relevant literature. Does this mean the research is not relevant? Or is it rather a reflection of poor levels of interaction between academics and policymakers? And what else does the data tell us about the likelihood of academic research being cited in policy literature?