WHO Leads in Using Solid Science to Draft COVID-19 Policy: Study

Governments are variable in their reliance on highly cited research, while international intergovernmental organizations such as the World Health Organization reliably link policy and science, according to an analysis of thousands of policy documents from the first half of 2020.

Written byMax Kozlov

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ABOVE: The World Health Organization (WHO) headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland
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As the COVID-19 pandemic has unfolded, scientific experts and policymakers have had to work together closely to keep up with the latest science and implement policies to prevent further transmission of the virus. Meanwhile, the pace at which COVID-19 research has been published has led misinformation to spread rampantly, sometimes working its way into the upper echelons of government.

To see how well policymakers worldwide incorporated solid COVID-19 research into their decisions, researchers examined scientific citations within 37,725 policy documents spanning 114 countries and 55 intergovernmental organizations that were drafted between early January and late May of last year. In a study published in Science yesterday (January 7), they found that these documents referenced COVID-19 papers that had, on average, 40 times more citations than other COVID-19 papers. Peer-reviewed papers from leading scientific journals were far more represented ...

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Meet the Author

Max Kozlov
Max is a science journalist from Boston. Though he studied cognitive neuroscience, he now prefers to write about brains rather than research them. Prior to writing for The Scientist as an editorial intern in late 2020 and early 2021, Max worked at the Museum of Science in Boston, where his favorite part of the job was dressing in a giant bee costume and teaching children about honeybees. He was also a AAAS Mass Media Fellow, where he worked as a science reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Read more of his work at www.maxkozlov.com.
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