Scholarly Citations in Canadian Policy Documents, A report for the Council of Canadian Academies

Claveau, François, Dion, Jérémie, Lareau, Francis, Montpetit, Éric, Ouimet, Mathieu et Louis Renaud-Desjardins (2025) Scholarly Citations in Canadian Policy Documents, A report for the Council of Canadian Academies, 18 p.

Main findings

• In the Canadian public sector, public agencies, such as health agencies and the Bank of Canada, demonstrate the highest attention to recent and international research, with this trend becoming clearer since 2005.
• The City of Toronto and provinces/territories in Canada show very low and declining attention to scholarly research in their policy documents.
• The federal government’s attention to research has been relatively stable since 2014, with around 35% of policy documents citing scholarly work, but the age of cited research has increased, indicating less focus on up-to-date findings.
• Although documents on some policy subjects such as the environment tend to pay more attention to scholarly work, the variation in citation propensity is much stronger across sources (municipal, provincial, federal and agencies) than it is across subject categories.
• Around 30% of scholarly citations in Canadian policy documents are to Canadian research, even though Canada is responsible for roughly 2% of scholarly output worldwide.
• These results about attention to science must be interpreted with caution because bibliometric work on Overton (the database used) is still in its infancy and scholarly citations in policy documents are, at best, an imperfect proxy for the policy impact of science.

Ce contenu a été mis à jour le 19 décembre 2025 à 11 h 47 min.