About

govscienceuseR is maintained by the Center for Environmental Policy & Behavior at the University of California, Davis. The project was borne out of our ongoing interest understanding the use of science in policy–both to inform process improvement for public agencies and inform scientists wanting their work to have an impact. While there are ample existing resources for bibliometric analysis of the scientific literature, similar capabilities for grey literature and policy documents are lacking… so we build our own. The R packages in the govscienceuseR project interface with a series of open-source software programs and bibliometric databases to allow a user to start with a set of PDF documents (e.g., plans, impact assessemnts, etc.) and ultimately generate a disambiguated bibliometric database of the references made in each document. Disambiguation–i.e., ground truthing the observed references to unique, identifable scientific journal articles and other products–provides the basis for analyzing supply-side features about the products being referenced and demand-side features about the organizations making references.

The govsciencesuseR software suite is open source. We encourage others to make use of these tools, and also welcome collaborations. If you use these tools, please cite the following:

govscienceuseR Development Team (Tyler A. Scott, Liza Wood, and Arthur Koehl) (2022-2023). govscienceuseR: Tools for automated extraction and disambiguation of scientific resources cited in government documents. govscienceuseR.github.io

@software{govscienceuseR, title = {govscienceuseR: Tools for automated extraction and disambiguation of scientific resources cited in government documents.}, author = {Tyler A. Scott, Liza Wood, and Arthur Koehl}, date = {2022/2023}, url = {govscienceuseR.github.io}, organization = {GovscienceuseR Development Team} }