Why Do Some Academic Articles Receive More Citations from Policy Communities?

Dr. Ji Ma
Assistant Professor in Philanthropic and Nonprofit Studies
RGK Center for Philanthropy and Community Service
LBJ School of Public Affairs
The University of Texas at Austin

In this article, the authors (1) present the landscape of the citations of Public Administration and Policy (PAP) scholarly articles in policy documents and (2) examine influencing factors along three dimensions: collaborative teams, cross-disciplinary interactions, and disruptive paradigms. Using data from the 30 most-cited PAP peer-reviewed journals and 38,062 documents from 1107 policy institutions, they find that 10.1% of all PAP scholarship receives high citations from both academics and policy communities. Collaborative teams, cross-disciplinary interactions, and disruptive paradigms can all increase the citations within policy communities, yet the relationships are not linear. Nonacademic authors can consistently attract more policy citations, whether publishing alone or collaborating with academics. According to the paper’s abstract, an article should ideally cite no more than 13 disciplinary subjects. No significant trade-off between scholarly and policy impact as scholarly citations and the academic reputation of authors often translate into policy citations. These findings offer novel and concrete insights into optimizing academic research for policy impact.

Dr. Ji Ma focuses on the nonprofit sector and data science. He studies why and how social relation matters in social and economic behaviors. His research interests include: impact of social relation on social, political, and economic behaviors; education and knowledge production in nonprofit and philanthropic studies; open data in policy studies; computational social science research methods.

Ji has a Ph.D. in Philanthropic Studies at Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy, with a Ph.D. minor in Data Science at IU School of Informatics and Computing. Before joining LBJ School, he worked at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard as Research Fellow. Ji has received numerous national and international awards, including Ford Foundation China Fellowship, Emerging Scholar Award from the Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action, and Penn Summer Doctoral Fellows from the University of Pennsylvania. He also has a diverse industrial experience: he was a social entrepreneur, a consultant of business management, and a journalist.