From Publications to Policy: Nicola Jones on SDG Research Impact Metrics
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2026/03/07
Nicola Jones, Director of the SDG programme at Springer Nature, coordinates publishing activity related to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals and works to surface research with real-world implementation potential. A core piece of that work is translating between ecosystems—research, policy, and practice—so evidence can travel farther than journal readership. She was one of the project leads on a report published in November 2025 “From publications to policy” in partnership with Overton, analyzing how research is cited in SDG related policy documents at scale.
In this interview, Scott Douglas Jacobsen speaks with Nicola Jones, Director of Springer Nature’s SDG programme, about tracing research influence beyond journals. Jones contrasts academic citations with policy citations, noting policy documents are heterogeneous, often unreferenced, and evidence also travels through advisory panels and accumulated bodies of work. Citing Springer Nature–Overton’s November 2025 analysis, she finds Society SDGs generate the most policy documents, while Biosphere policies cite research at higher rates. US institutions dominate citations worldwide, pointing to language and prestige effects. She recommends clearer summaries and science communication for busy policymakers worldwide, and shifting assessment toward outcomes and implementation.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What’s the gap between research impact and policy impact downstream?
Nicola Jones: Traditionally, the impact of academic research has been measured by how many times it is cited in other academic publications. This number gives us a sense of how much a research publication feeds into the wider literature on a topic by quantifying how many other publications refer to it. This is a long-standing tradition in academia and it’s very standardised because of the way research publications have a standardised format – Clarivate’s Journal Citation Reports have existed for over 50 years. However, citation of work in other research publications does not tell us much about how research influences decision making outside of academia. Policy impact gives us an idea of how much research findings have influenced policymaking, which is one way to quantify the impact of research beyond academic settings. And of course research is not the only influence on policymaking – and it shouldn’t be the only influence on policymaking.
Jacobsen: Policy citations can be a seductive metrics. What do they capture well and not well?
Jones: Like any citation metric, policy citations are a proxy measure of impact. The policy literature is not standardized in the same way as the academic literature is – both in terms of the variety of document formats, e.g. white paper, briefing, meeting minutes, budget, and in terms of the ways in which each type of document is laid out. This means that just counting citations can only give us an indication of impact. It’s likely that research evidence is incorporated into policymaking but not cited in policy documents for a wide variety of reasons – the impact might come from participation of researchers on policy advisory panels, impact may result from whole bodies of work rather than individual publications, and some policy documents simply don’t include references, only recommendations.
Policy citations are one piece of a wider puzzle. If the goal is to quantify the impact of research beyond academia, then the outcomes of policy implementation are also important and this isn’t captured by policy citation metrics. An example that’s easy to understand would be research into a new health intervention that is found to be effective in a clinical trial. It’s not enough to know how many times policy documents recommend the intervention – to be able to assess the true impact of the research, we would also need to know statistics on actual implementation of the intervention and the impact on health outcomes.
Jacobsen: Which SDGs tend to get the most policy uptake?
Jones: In our report, we grouped the SDGs according to the Stockholm Resilience Centre’s “wedding cake model”:
Economy: SDGs 8, 9, 10 and 12
Society: SDGs 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 11 and 16
Biosphere: SDGs 6, 13, 14, 15
We found that the Society grouping accounts for the largest number of policy documents and the largest number of those documents that cite scholarly research. To some extent this is driven by health policy and research as SDG 3: Good Health and Wellbeing has the highest number of policy documents in Overton’s database, and the highest volume of research publications. However, when we look at the proportion of policy documents that cite research publications for each of these groupings, we see that the Biosphere related policy documents cite research at slightly higher rates than Economy or Society – 16% of Biosphere related policy documents cited research compared to 13% of Economy related policy documents and 11% of Society related policy documents.
Jacobsen: How do language and institutional power potentially bias what gets cited?
Jones: Our analysis showed that research from US institutions is the most commonly cited in policy documents around the world, no matter which country wrote the policy. We had expected governments to cite more of their own country’s research, but the data didn’t support that. The only clear exceptions were Brazil, India and Australia, which all cite their own research as much as, or more than, research from the US.
Because most academic research is published in English, even though many policy documents are written in other languages, this may create a language bias. In other words, research written in English could be more likely to be cited simply because it is more widely available.
Brazil stands out in particular. Some have suggested this might be because of language, but we didn’t see the same pattern in other Latin American or European countries. A more likely explanation is that, in Brazil, government and research priorities are closely aligned—so policymakers naturally cite domestic research more often.
Institutional reputation may also influence which research gets cited. Other studies have shown that researchers from the Global South are often left out of development research, and well-known institutions tend to be seen as more credible. For busy policymakers, name recognition alone may shape which research they trust and decide to cite.
Jacobsen: How should researchers write about findings?
Jones: Our report looked at the impact of different content formats and found that news, reviews and letters were cited in policy documents at higher rates compared to publication volumes and academic citations. What this suggests is that timelines and summaries of information are important when it comes to policy impact. Researchers will always need to follow academic publication conventions when writing up their findings, but this points to a role for additional summary content for policy makers, and a place for wider science communication mechanisms from researchers, institutions and publishers to make evidence available to those who need it, when they need it.
Jacobsen: What did the Overton work reveal about the final steps from publication to implementation?
Jones: While the report focuses on data analysis of citation patterns, we are keen to explore insights from researchers and policymakers about how research comes to the attention of policymakers and ends up influencing policy, and we plan to extend the report throughout 2026 with case studies to share this information.
Jacobsen: What incentives should be changed regarding universities to reward genuine societal contribution?
Jones: Another report published by Springer Nature last year “The State of Research Assessment” found that a majority of researchers would like their work to be assessed on the basis of multiple quantitative and qualitative factors including contributions within and beyond research environments. To do so would require stakeholders across the research ecosystem to work together – not just researchers and publishers, but institutions and funders too. The Joint Taskforce on Outcomes and Impacts, convened by HESI 2022 – 2023 (full disclosure: I contributed to this Taskforce) recommended a shift from assessing researchers and universities on the basis of outputs to instead look at outcomes that result from their work – particularly those aligned with the SDGs
Jacobsen: Thank you very much for the opportunity and your time, Nicola.
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