DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.13972074
title: Dataset for 'A Matter of Culture? Conceptualising and Investigating 'Evidence Cultures' within Research on Evidence-Informed Policymaking'

description: IntroductionThis document describes the data collection and datasets used in the manuscript "A Matter of Culture? Conceptualising and Investigating ‘Evidence Cultures’ within Research on Evidence-Informed Policymaking" [1].

Data Collection

To construct the citation network analysed in the manuscript, we first designed a series of queries to capture a large sample of literature exploring the relationship between evidence, policy, and culture from various perspectives. Our team of domain experts developed the following queries based on terms common in the literature. These queries search for the terms included in the titles, abstracts, and associated keywords of WoS indexed records (i.e. ‘TS=’). While these are separated below for ease of reading, they combined into a single query via the OR operator in our search. Our search was conducted on the Web of Science’s (WoS) Core Collection through the University of Edinburgh Library subscription on 29/11/2023, returning a total of 2,089 records.

TS = ((“cultures of evidence” OR “culture of evidence” OR “culture of knowledge” OR “cultures of knowledge” OR “research culture” OR “research cultures” OR “culture of research” OR “cultures of research” OR “epistemic culture” OR “epistemic cultures” OR “epistemic community” OR “epistemic communities” OR “epistemic infrastructure” OR “evaluation culture” OR “evaluation cultures” OR “culture of evaluation” OR “cultures of evaluation” OR “thought style” OR “thought styles” OR “thought collective” OR “thought collectives” OR “knowledge regime” OR “knowledge regimes” OR “knowledge system” OR “knowledge systems” OR “civic epistemology” OR “civic epistemologies”) AND (“policy” OR “policies” OR “policymaking” OR “policy making” OR “policymaker” OR “policymakers” OR “policy maker” OR “policy makers” OR “policy decision” OR “policy decisions” OR “political decision” OR “political decisions” OR “political decision making”))

OR

TS = ((“culture” OR “cultures”) AND ((“evidence-based” OR “evidence-informed” OR “evidence-led” OR “science-based” OR “science-informed” OR “science-led” OR “research-based” OR “research-informed” OR “evidence use” OR “evidence user” OR “evidence utilisation” OR “evidence utilization” OR “research use” OR “researcher user” OR “research utilisation” OR “research utilization” OR “research in” OR “evidence in” OR “science in”) NEAR/1 (“policymaking” OR “policy making” OR “policy maker” OR “policy makers”)))

OR

TS = ((“culture” OR “cultures”) AND (“scientific advice” OR “technical advice” OR “scientific expertise” OR “technical expertise” OR “expert advice”) AND (“policy” OR “policies” OR “policymaking” OR “policy making” OR “policymaker” OR “policymakers” OR “policy maker” OR “policy makers” OR “political decision” OR “political decisions” OR “political decision making”))  

OR

TS = ((“culture” OR “cultures”) AND (“post-normal science” OR “trans-science” OR “transdisciplinary” OR “transdisiplinarity” OR “science-policy interface” OR “policy sciences” OR “sociology of knowledge” OR “sociology of science” OR “knowledge transfer” OR “knowledge translation” OR “knowledge broker” OR “implementation science” OR “risk society”) AND (“policymaking” OR “policy making” OR “policymaker” OR “policymakers” OR “policy maker” OR “policy makers”))

Citation Network Construction

All bibliographic metadata on these 2,089 records were downloaded in five batches in plain text and then merged in R. We then parsed these data into network readable files. All unique reference strings are given unique node IDs. A node-attribute-list (‘CE_Node’) links identifying information of each document with its node ID, including authors, title, year of publication, journal WoS ID, and WoS citations. An edge-list (‘CE_Edge’) records all citations from these documents to their bibliographies – with edges going from a citing document to the cited – using the relevant node IDs. These data were then cleaned by (a) matching DOIs for reference strings that differ but point to the same paper, and (b) manual merging of obvious duplicates caused by referencing errors.

Our initial dataset consisted of 2,089 retrieved documents and 123,772 unretrieved cited documents (i.e. documents that were cited within the publications we retrieved but which were not one of these 2,089 documents). These documents were connected by 157,229 citation links, but ~87% of the documents in the network were cited just once. To focus on relevant literature, we filtered the network to include only documents with at least three citation or reference links. We further refined the dataset by focusing on the main connected component, resulting in 6,650 nodes and 29,198 edges. It is this dataset that we publish here, and it is this network that underpins Figure 1, Table 1, and the qualitative examination of documents (see manuscript for further details). 

Our final network dataset contains 1,819 of the documents in our original query (~87% of the original retrieved records), and 4,831 documents not retrieved via our Web of Science search but cited by at least three of the retrieved documents. We then clustered this network by modularity maximization via the Leiden algorithm [2], detecting 14 clusters with Q=0.59. Citations to documents within the same cluster constitute ~77% of all citations in the network. 

Citation Network Dataset Description

We include two network datasets: (i) ‘CE_Node.csv’ that contains 1,819 retrieved documents, 4,831 unretrieved referenced documents, making for a total of 6,650 documents (nodes); (ii)’CE_Edge.csv’ that records citations (edges) between the documents (nodes), including a total of 29,198 citation links. These files can be used to construct a network with many different tools, but we have formatted these to be used in Gephi 0.10[3]. 

‘CE_Node.csv’ is a comma-separate values file that contains two types of nodes: 

i.                    Retrieved documents – these are documents captured by our query. These include full bibliographic metadata and reference lists. 

ii.                  Non-retrieved documents – these are documents referenced by our retrieved documents but were not retrieved via our query. These only have data contained within their reference string (i.e. first author, journal or book title, year of publication, and possibly DOI). 

The columns in the .csv refer to:

-          Id, the node ID

-          Label, the reference string of the document

-          DOI, the DOI for the document, if available

-          WOS_ID, WoS accession number

-          Authors, named authors

-          Title, title of document

-          Document_type, variable indicating whether a document is an article, review, etc.

-          Journal_book_title, journal of publication or title of book

-          Publication year, year of publication.

-          WOS_times_cited, total Core Collection citations as of 29/11/2023

-          Indegree, number of within network citations to a given document

-          Cluster, provides the cluster membership number as discussed in the manuscript (Figure 1)

‘CE_Edge.csv’ is a comma-separated values file that contains edges (citation links) between nodes (documents) (n=29,198). The columns refer to:

-          Source, node ID of the citing document

-          Target, node ID of the cited document

Cluster Analysis

We qualitatively analyse a set of publications from seven of the largest clusters in our manuscript. For this, we calculated the within cluster indegree of nodes, and read through the 10 most cited retrieved documents and 10 most cited unretrieved documents. To generate these lists, sub-graphs for each cluster needed to be generated, and then indegree was measured (i.e. counting the number of citations from papers within a cluster to other papers in that same cluster).

Notes

[1] Bandola-Gill, J., Andersen, N., Leng, R. I., Pattyn, V., & Smith, K. E. (forthcoming). A Matter of Culture? Conceptualising and Investigating ‘Evidence Cultures’ within Research on Evidence-Informed Policymaking. Policy and Society

[2] Traag, V. A., Waltman, L., & van Eck, N. J. (2019). From Louvain to Leiden: guaranteeing well-connected communities. Scientific reports, 9(1), 5233. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-41695-z

[3] Bastian, M., Heymann, S., & Jacomy, M. (2009). Gephi: an open source software for exploring and manipulating networks. International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media. Gephi is available via https://gephi.org/