Quantifying the Relevance of Youth Research Cited in the US Policy Documents

In recent years, there has been a growing concern and emphasis on conducting research beyond academic or scientific research communities, benefiting society at large. A well-known approach to measuring the impact of research on society is enumerating its policy citation(s). Despite the importance of research in informing policy, there is no concrete evidence to suggest the research’s relevance in cited policy documents. This is concerning because it may increase the possibility of evidence used in policy being manipulated by individual, social, or political biases that may lead to inappropriate, fragmented, or archaic research evidence in policy. Therefore, it is crucial to identify the degree of relevance between research articles and citing policy documents. In this paper, we examined the scale of contextual relevance of youth-focused research in the referenced US policy documents using natural language processing techniques, state-of-the-art pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs), and statistical analysis. Our experiments and analysis concluded that youth-related research articles that get US policy citations are mostly relevant to the citing policy documents.