Does Literature Research Have Any Impact on Legislation? A Case Study of China’s Biosecurity Law

Understanding the extent to which scientific research informs legislation is essential for evidence-based policymaking. This study evaluates the thematic alignment between China’s Biosecurity Law and the academic literature related to biosecurity, using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modeling and bibliometric analysis. The analysis is based on the full text of the 2024 version of the Biosecurity Law and 482 peer-reviewed articles published between 1999 and 2024. The results identify six principal topics in the legislation and eight thematic clusters in the literature. A cosine similarity assessment indicates a moderate degree of alignment, with an average similarity score of 0.223. While certain topics—such as public health governance and legal risk management—demonstrate convergence, substantial gaps are observed. These include insufficient legislative attention to rural biosecurity, underrepresentation of genetically modified organism (GMO) regulation, and limited incorporation of international laboratory safety standards. Based on these findings, the study proposes targeted policy recommendations to enhance legal responsiveness, including strengthening rural epidemic control systems, improving oversight of biological materials, and aligning domestic regulations with global biosafety norms. The proposed methodological framework provides a replicable and scalable approach for assessing law–research coherence in domains such as health, environment, and biotechnology governance.