Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

A frequent lament among researchers, including scientists and engineers, is "policy makers should pay more careful attention to the results of our research."  If there is any single area where one might expect scientific and technical information (STI) to be used in public policy making and agenda setting it is in Science and Technology policy. However, one steeped in the literature of public policy theory understands that STI is only one of many types of information used in policy making and that policy actors differ in the extent to which they view STI as credible, particularly, more credible than information based on other "credibility warrants," such as personal experience, authority, history and anecdote, analogical reasoning or conformance to ideology, to name just a few of the alternatives. In our NSF sponsored study of the effects of STI in science policy making, our research team has in previous work (Youtie, et al., in press; Youtie, et al., 2015; Kao, et al., 2015) examined more than 400 National Research Council reports to determine how the composition of information contained in those reports, particularly the amount of STI (cited formal journal articles, proceeedings, conferece papers, forms of formal knowledge) cited and used in reports affects the impacts of the reports in terms of subsequent use in policy making or reporting in the mass media.  Here we build on the previous bibliometrics based work, providing more in depth answers based on semi-structured in terviews with both NRC committee members and, especially, NRC staff, each of whom has an important role in structuring the study or study panels and in affecting susequent use.  Our interviews show that the amount of STI in the report tends to have modest effects, usually negative, on the likelihood that reports will be used in policy making.  More important factors include the timing of the report with respect to political agendas, the party requesting the report and enacted role of NRC staff members and Committee chairs.