Sebastian Ramirez-Ruiz

🚨 We're hiring!
Join our CSES Team @gesis.org Cologne as a Senior Researcher. If you’re into comparative electoral research and love diving into data, this is your moment.
Come shape global democracy with us! 🌍📊
www.gesis.org/en/institute...

Perhaps @kunkakom.bsky.social (?)

A 2023 NHB paper concluded that corrections of science-relevant misinformation are, on average, ineffective. Our response (in press) challenges this conclusion, showing why corrections *are* effective, and why considering measurement is important:
🔗 osf.io/preprints/ps...
(1/5)

🚨 New working paper 🚨

Can protests move Bystanders, citizens who observe protest without participating?

We tested this in a 3-wave field experiment. Check out our thread below👇🧵

Very excited to share a new preprint.

@jesperasring.bsky.social and I study how politicians engage with evidence in the real world.

Link: osf.io/8zv9s

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I feel personally attacked by this—damn you GPT.

I have all my Overleaf documents full of "---" to prove it.

Thanks, Stuart. That is a really nice compliment, especially coming from you. I am always looking at the illustrations in your work and thinking to myself, "Damn, those are good." I really appreciate it.

Thanks a lot, @mathiaswullum.bsky.social! Really appreciate it. I see a lot of conceptual overlap with your work on citation concentration in the academic space. Would love any feedback you might have, and always open to ideas on where to take the data next!

Cool data! The Global North is really where expert knowledge is produced.

Not fair, not just, but yes soft power is mostly concentrated there. Wish GN elites cared.

Also: differently from elsewhere, 60% of expert refs in USA docs cite papers with only USA-based academics as authors #exceptionalism

Huge thanks to @rsenninger.bsky.social for an amazing collaboration and to everyone who shared their thoughts and helped shape this project—especially @simonsaysnothin.bsky.social, Asya Magazinnik, @conjugateprior.org and all the wonderful people at @hertiedatascience.bsky.social! 🙏✨

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This is a VERY LONG thread with lots more in the paper. I am surprised you made it this far! Please check it out & share your thoughts 📝

There are millions of research questions we can explore with these data. Got ideas? Reach out!

We will be at EPSA and would love to grab coffee & chat ☕️🤝

The expert knowledge in official docs is not evenly spread and holds signals about who gets seen in global policymaking 🌍⚖️📚

All-in-all, I take from this project that expert info use globally is not just about ideas—it is shaped by visibility, access, perceived legitimacy, and ultimately power.

Or this thread by @rebekahtromble.bsky.social

These knowledge systems are fragile...

bsky.app/profile/rebe...

Think of this commentary by @briannosek.bsky.social and the @cos.io team about executive action in the U.S.

bsky.app/profile/bria...

The places that are reference points in our corpus—like 🇺🇸, 🇬🇧, and 🇪🇺—also lead global R&D & host strong academic & policy institutions fueling steady evidence flows.

But these systems ARE NOT GUARANTEED: political shifts, funding cuts & ideology can undermine their resilience.⚠️📉

This matters because as @evavivalt.bsky.social et al. suggest, policy professionals might prefer locally relevant knowledge.

But acting on those preferences, well... barriers like limited capacity & budgets might lead them to rely on what's visible and accessible instead.

bsky.app/profile/evav...

So WHAT TO MAKE OF THIS?

Our document corpus (Overton) reflect the visible layer of knowledge in govt policy docs—shaped by who can (or is willing) to produce, preserve & share evidence digitally.

🌐 Countries with stronger institutions & digital infrastructure appear more prominently.

Share of policy-based and scholarly references across policy domains.

Across policy domains:

📚 Some lean more on scholarly research, others on policy sources (think of lit on 'cultures of evidence').

Yet across all domains, 🌍 governments mainly cite knowledge from high-income countries.

Bottom line: origins of references stay stable despite domain differences.

Multipanel figure providing an overview of the distribution of reference metrics across the government-to-government citation matrix and to scholarly works.

Who's cited most across borders?

🇺🇸 The U.S. leads gov-to-gov refs by a wide margin. 🇬🇧, 🇩🇪, 🇨🇦, 🇦🇺 follow. Also, 30 countries—mostly Least Developed—were never cited.

📚 Same for academic refs: 17 of top 20 gov-cited countries also top in academia.

🤯 43% of scholarly works include a U.S.-based author.

Figure illustrating composition of the 'provenance' of policy-based and scholarly references across regions

Foreign v. domestic:

🌍 Global South govs rely mainly on foreign policy sources; Global North mostly on domestic.

🇺🇸 60% of scholarly refs in the U.S. docs cite papers with only U.S.-based academics as authors 🤯

🌐 Elsewhere, foreign or mixed international author make-ups dominate.

Using this rich data setup, we set to explore 3 key questions:

1️⃣ How much do govs rely on domestic vs. foreign evidence? 🌍🏠

2️⃣ Which countries' policy & academic outputs are most cited? 📊🌐

3️⃣ How do citation patterns vary across policy domains with unique knowledge needs? 📚⚖️

Figure illustrating the data collection setting

We classify cited sources into two types:

📑 Policy-based (govs, IGOs, think tanks)
📚 Scholarly (journal articles, working papers, preprints)

*And collected additional metadata relevant to them

We built a unique relational database using data from Overton & OpenAlex, including:

🧾 1.2M+ government docs
🔗 3.5M+ citations to academic research
🏛️ 740K+ citations to policy sources

This gives us a unique look at what evidence governments around the globe actually reference.

Why should we all care?

Because evidence is central to decision-making—and what counts as credible knowledge shapes which voices are heard, which problems are prioritized, and which solutions get attention.

But access to and use of evidence is not neutral.

Why do we study this?

Gov agencies, academics, IGOs, & think tanks all create knowledge, but how much it actually transpires to policymaking is still unclear.

Understanding which sources do, matters.

Info is key in most major policy process theories and shapes real-world outcomes. 📊

TL;DR:

🌍 Global South cites more foreign evidence; richer countries rely mostly on 'domestic' sources.

🇺🇸, 🇪🇺, & other Global North lead in production of policy-based & academic research cited worldwide.

📚 Policy domains differ in evidence use, but most knowledge comes from powerful economies

Screenshot of the draft's title page

📄 Whose expert knowledge informs policymaking around the world?

@rsenninger.bsky.social and I analyze data from 1.2 million government policy documents from 185 countries—and find a prominent pattern:

🌍 Policy evidence is overwhelmingly sourced from the Global North.

Preprint: osf.io/w8q3y

🧪🧵👇

Sherlock at the Brickyard: On Clues, Chaos, and Construction What Two “No” Votes Taught Me about the Resilience and Rupture in International Cooperation

What do a 1963 Science letter, two “No” votes, & Sherlock Holmes have to do with academic writing?

More than you think.

New Respect the Marble post on moving from insight to understanding, from bricks to walls, & why it’s worth our effort.

🧵

catherineeunicedevries.substack.com/p/sherlock-a...

"Invitation Letters Increase Response Rates in Elite Surveys" with @nathaliegiger.bsky.social. Short report @ JEPS.

www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

We should have orders of magnitude fewer “theories” in PS than we do papers.