The dynamics of issue attention in policy process scholarship

Abstract

This article examines the policy topics and theoretical debates found in Policy Studies Journal (PSJ) articles over the last three decades. PSJ is the premier journal for scholars studying policy processes, seeking to create generalizable theories across the spectrum of specific policy areas. To examine trends in PSJ over time, we collected 1314 abstracts from PSJ articles. We identified abstracts that mention major theories of the policy process and stages of the policy cycle. Next, we measured their policy content using the Comparative Agendas Project codebook, as well as their citations in academic journals and policy documents. We then explore these data, finding that changes in the content of PSJ articles over time correspond with other trends in the policy process field and PSJ's increased impact factor.

Full text

Policy Stud J. 2024;52:481–492.
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INTRODUCTION
In this article, we offer analysis and insights on the policy agenda of the Policy Studies Journal ( PSJ) on its
50th anniversary. PSJ is tremendously important for the field of public policy and is the premier destina-
tion for scholars who advance and apply policy process theories. Articles published in the journal show-
case the issues scholars deem important as objects of study, particularly policies created by governments
across time and space. At the same time, policies covered by the journal signal the issue priorities of the
policy process community and contribute to a scholarly culture often emulated in future scholarship.
Scholars learn different lessons from the agenda of the PSJ—not least of which is the language of policy
scholarship. Substantively, they learn which issues are popular to study and which to ignore.
In this article, we manually code over 1300 PSJ abstracts using the Comparative Agendas Project code-
book to map the policy agenda of PSJ, building up theory- and issue- specific profiles of scientific
Received: 23 September 2023
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Revised: 18 April 2024
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Accepted: 3 May 2024
DOI: 10.1111/ps j.1254 8
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
The dynamics of issue attention in policy process
scholarship
E. J. Fagan1 | Alexander Furnas2 | Chris Koski3 |
Herschel Thomas4 | Samuel Workman5 | Corinne Connor6
This is an open access article under t he terms of the Creat ive Commons Attribution License, which permits use, d istribution a nd reproduction
in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
© 2024 The Author(s). Policy Studies Jou rnal publ ished by Wiley Periodicals LLC on beha lf of Policy Stud ies Organization.
1Department of Pol itical Science, University of
Ill inois Chicago, Chicago, Ill inois, USA
2Center for Science of Science and Innovation,
Kellogg School of Mana gement , Northwestern
University, Evanston, Il linois, USA
3Department of Pol itical Science, Reed College,
Portland, Oregon, USA
4Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affa irs,
University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA
5John D. “Jay” Rockefeller School of Policy and
Politics, West Virgin ia University, Morgantown,
West Virginia, USA
6Heinz Foundat ion, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania,
USA
Correspondence
E. J. Fagan, Universit y of Illinois Chicago, 1007
W Harrison St. Chicago, IL , 60607 USA.
Email: ejfagan@uic.edu
Abstract
This article examines the policy topics and theoretical debates
found in Policy Studies Journal ( PSJ) articles over the last three
decades. PSJ is the premier journal for scholars studying policy
processes, seeking to create generalizable theories across the
spectrum of specific policy areas. To examine trends in PSJ over
time, we collected 1314 abstracts from PSJ articles. We identi-
fied abstracts that mention major theories of the policy process
and stages of the policy cycle. Next, we measured their policy
content using the Comparative Agendas Project codebook, as
well as their citations in academic journals and policy docu-
ments. We then explore these data, finding that changes in the
content of PSJ articles over time correspond with other trends
in the policy process field and PSJ's increased impact factor.
KE YWORDS
policy agendas, policy cycle, policy process, policy stages, policy theories,
science of science

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attention to policy issues. The results allow us to reflect on the topics PSJ research discusses and com-
pare them to those discussed by policymakers and think tanks. In theory, policy scholarship should
follow policymaking (though, typically, there is a significant lag between journal publication and issue
emergence, see Adams & Roger Clemmons, 2013; Powell, 2016). Policy scholars reading this know at-
tention to issues is finite, as is journal space, so the issues appearing in PSJ can safely be thought of as
markers of important topics.
PSJ's issue agenda provides one indicator of the policy scholarship agenda over long periods. We
can use this measurement to catalog and chronicle the relationship between issues of the moment and
issues covered by the journal. Our coding of the PSJ agenda enables us to answer questions about the
patterns and antecedents of academic inquiry in addition to the nexus between academic inquiry and
public policymaking. Specifically, we ask: What is the public policy agenda through the lens of one of its
most widely read journals? Answering this question can help us know where we have gone (or stayed),
where we are, and where we need to go. This research note first discusses our analytical motivation and
approach stemming from the emerging “science of science” field. We then provide an overview of our
collection of PSJ abstracts, our application of the Comparative Agendas Project coding scheme, and
descriptive patterns in policy focus. Next, our analysis traces variations in the types of policies different
process theory scholars research, assesses the relative impact of work across policy topics measured by
citations outside of the journal, and compares the PSJ agenda to research conducted by governmental
institutions (e.g., the Congressional Research Service) and outside think tanks. We conclude with a
discussion of our findings and outline a research agenda for mapping the policy topics of the scientific
enterprise.
A “SCIENCE OF SCIENCE” APPROACH
We examine PSJ articles to understand how the journal has changed over the decades and as a contribu-
tion to the emerging “Science of Science” literature (Fortunato et al., 2018). In recent years, Science of
Science scholars have harnessed large- scale bibliometric databases (Archambault et al., 2009), corpora of
scientific publications (Priem et al., 2022), and computational social science tools to document (Boyack
et al., 2005; Uzzi et al., 2013) and model (Peng et al., 2021; Wang et al., 2013) scientific production, in-
novation, citation, and its economic impacts (Jones, 2021; Miao et al., 2022; Wu et al., 2019). Vannevar
Bush's vision, where scientists have significant discretion over methods and scope, guides the post- war
scientific production in the United States. Bush, an American engineer and inventor who shaped the
US scientific infrastructure, emphasized scientists being “free to pursue the truth wherever it may lead”
(Bush, 2020). Having scientists making the funding decisions at federal institutions was critical to this
aim. At the time, Senator Harley Kilgore (D- WV) offered a contrasting vision for scientific enterprise
in the US. Kilgore proposed a New Deal system in which the government played a much more active
role in setting the scientific agenda, helping ensure scientists focused on problems of public importance
and were conducting work producing social benefit (Kevles, 1977; Sampat, 2020).
This debate at the foundation of the modern scientific enterprise raises fundamental questions
about whether scientific research serves public needs and if the agenda of scientific research is re-
sponsive to policymakers' demands and needs. Recent work by Yin and colleagues has found that the
public funding fields of science received is roughly proportional to how the public uses science from
that field across three domains: media, policy, and patenting (Yin et al., 2022). While this evidence
suggests funding tracks public use at the field level, this new data- driven Science of Science has
largely ignored the topical agenda considerations of the scientific enterprise. A key insight of policy
research is that the allocation of agenda space is hugely consequential ( Jones & Baumgartner, 2005).
That is, scholarly productivity and attention are scarce resources. Scientists, funders, reviewers,
and journals make allocative decisions that shape the “policy agenda of science,” producing large
amounts of relevant research for certain policy issues or questions. In contrast, others are under-
studied or largely ignored. To date, there is no systematic empirical evidence regarding the policy

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agenda of scientific research or how the scholarly agenda relates to the policy agendas of societal
actors whom that evidence might inform. In this article, we bring this perspective to the study of
scientific attention by analyzing the agenda of PSJ, a premier venue for policy- focused scientific re-
search. The journal content coding approach we pilot here serves as a model for future scholarship,
which may consider the broader policy agenda of scientific research.
We first collected abstracts from PSJ articles available in commercial databases. We identify all
PSJ articles indexed by Dimensions (Digital Science, 2018), a large commercial bibliometric database
of over 122 million publications, their references, and funding sources. We identify 2965 PSJ publi-
cations with digital object identifiers (DOIs) published between September 1972 and January 2023.1
Using their DOIs, we retrieve abstracts from the largest publicly available collection of scientific
abstract text, OpenAlex (Priem et al., 2022).2 We eliminated all book reviews, front matter, editorial
notes, and all articles without an abstract cataloged by OpenAlex. This process yielded 1314 publi-
cations with available abstracts, consistent with general abstract coverage levels in bibliometric da-
tabases.3 We further detail how we measured the variables used in this article in the Supplementary
Methodological Appendix.
We next measured the policy content of each abstract. We assigned abstracts to one major policy
topic using the Comparative Agendas Project (CAP) topic coding system ( Jones, 2015; Work man
et al., 2022). The CAP system assigns observations to 20 major topics, such as environmental, de-
fense, or trade policy. It allows researchers to make internally valid comparisons over time, across
space, and between contexts. The first step involved determining whether the abstract contained
policy content assignable to a major topic area. Many abstracts tested general theories of the policy
process, governance, methodology, or policy analysis. We asked coders to assign an observation to a
policy code if its research question matches a major topic or if the article employs a substantial case
to test a politics or policy- related research question. Where coders disagreed, a third coder broke
the tie.4
We observe a diverse range of policy topics in PSJ articles in Figure 1,5 with one major exception.
Other than no substantive topic, the most common policy topic was environmental policy. These ar-
ticles touched on various subjects, from hazardous material regulation to climate change to drinking
water safety. After environmental policy, attention is roughly divided between eight or nine topics,
FIGUR E 1 Subfigure (a) shows the distribut ion of paper across policy topics from our coding of abstract text. Subfigure
(b) shows the normalized Shannon's H of the topic codings for papers published in PSJ over time. We exclude the “No
Substant ive Topic” category from the calculation of Shannon's H so the measure reflects the diversity of PSJ papers across
substantive policy topics. The years 1986–1990 are excluded from this plot because there are no coded papers due to the lack
of available abstracts in OpenAlex.

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spanning many different areas. Other than foreign policy topics such as defense, foreign affairs, and
trade, PSJ represents a full spectrum of policy topics. We observe articles on topics without substantive
topics and environmental policy are more likely to be funded, although few PSJ articles are funded
overall. Public lands and water issues, education, and social welfare are also more likely to be funded,
though less than environmental policy. To a small degree, the distribution of policy topics in PSJ may
reflect donor or governmental priorities.
To understand how diverse PSJ's policy topics were over time, we calculated a normalized Shannon's
H score of the annual diversity of topics in articles (Boydstun et al., 2014). Higher values of diversity
indicate more dispersion of attention across the range of 20 policy topic codes, while lower values cor-
respond to a concentration of attention to a smaller number of topics. Figure 1b shows that the agenda
diversity of PSJ articles peaked in the 2000s and early 2010s, with a narrower agenda before and after.
However, we should note that our pre- 1990s articles contain a partial sample.
The broad range of substantive policy topics we observe in Figure 1 is heartening given PSJ's primary
mission to first establish and test generalized theories of the policy process. PSJ investigates research
questions across a wide range of domestic issues. However, we note the recent decline in the diversity of
PSJ's policy topics and its relative lack of attention to foreign policy issues.
THEORIES, POLICY STAGES, AND POLICY TOPICS IN PSJ
Over the last 30 years, PSJ has been home to developments in policy process theory. Today's readers and
contributors (and editors, no doubt) think about substantive policy issues and the lens through which
those issues are analyzed. To examine developments in policy process theory, we used keyword searches
to identify discussions of major policy process theories and concepts in PSJ abstracts. We identified dis-
cussions of the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF), Ecology of Games (EG), Institutional Analysis
and Design Framework (IAD), Multiple Streams Framework (MS), Narrative Policy Framework (NPF),
Punctuated Equilibrium Theory (PET), Policy Feedback (PF), Policy Diffusion (PD), and Social
Construction (SC).
Figure 2a displays the distribution of the nine dominant policy theories in PSJ articles. The results
reveal PET as a significant outlier with a presence roughly equivalent to all other theories combined. We
are somewhat surprised by the relative magnitude of PET articles. However, it is also not lost on us that
the majority of the authors of this article are contributors to PET in this journal and other publications.
ACF and policy design are the next most common, followed by a similar presence of IAD, MS, NPF,
and SC. Perhaps equally surprising as the large presence of PET articles is the relatively small presence
FIGUR E 2 Subfigure (a) shows the distribut ion of PSJ papers across policy theories identified using keywords in the
abstract. Subfigure (b) shows the stage of the policymaking cycle papers addressed and identified using keywords in the
abstract.

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of policy feedback theory articles—particularly given that policy feedback emerges around the same
time as other major theories and is featured in several influential public policy and political science
books. Ecology of games, a younger theory (only recently just placed in the most recent 5th edition of
Theories of the Policy Process), ranks at the bottom (for now).
While it is true that policy theories dominate the current intellectual discourse and graduate educa-
tion regarding public policy, we know from personal experience that the stages heuristic provides an-
other logical way to organize policy research.6 We identified mentions of policy process stages, problem
definitions, agenda setting, lawmaking, implementation, evaluation, and succession (DeLeon, 1999).
Figure 2b shows some surprising results, particularly concerning the findings in Figure 2a. Notably, the
majority of papers we code address implementation and evaluation. We imagine most policy scholars
would think of a sample of articles dominated by PET students to focus on agenda- setting and law-
making—but we do not find that true. In Figure 3, we investigate these relationships more explicitly.
Figure 3 represents a crosswalk of the three categories we apply to PSJ articles. Figure 3a shows PET
to apply to the widest range of topics, which we expect given the total number of articles using PET in
our dataset. ACF and Policy Diffusion are the next most commonly used theories in PSJ articles, but
they differ in the range of topics they cover. Policy Diffusion has a broad range of policy topics more
similar to PET than ACF, which heavily specializes in issues of environment and energy policy. Other
theories fall into these two patterns of specialization and diversity—in ways many policy scholars would
predict. IAD scholarship in PSJ focuses on environmental or water management issues, which stands to
reason from a theory derived from commons problems scholarship; MSF scholarship focuses on health
care policy, understandable for a theory developed on an examination of Medicare; SCF scholarship is
broadly focused on criminal and social welfare policy, perhaps unsurprising for a theory based upon
understanding these policies disempower certain groups, and policy feedback theory similarly focuses
on social welfare policy for similar reasons to SCF. Though it is a newer policy process theory, the NPF
does stand out as similar to PET and policy diffusion, having a fairly broad topic presence. It is possi-
ble to see how the earliest applications of various theories result in their continued topic focus (or lack
thereof). Moreover, Figure 3 lends a great deal of face validity to our methodological approach.
Figure 3b shows the relative dominance of implementation across all topic areas and a similarly broad
distribution of topics across evaluation, the second most common stage coded in the policy cycle for PSJ
articles. Figure 3c shows the stages of the policy process discussed by policy theory. Mentions of stages are
relatively rare in articles discussing policy process theories, showing a shift from the stages heuristic to a
more theoretical orientation in PSJ articles—the maturing of the field and its broader scientific endeavor.
When mentioned, they are more evenly dispersed across stages than the population of articles as a whole.
Figures 2 and 3 inform the overall distribution and heterogeneity of topics in Figure 1. No doubt, a
reader from outside the PSJ would be surprised to find the modal article in the journal has no substantive
FIGUR E 3 Subfigure (a) displays the number of PSJ papers by policy topic and theoretical framework. Subfigure (b)
shows the number of PSJ papers by policy topic and part of the policy cycle. Subfigure (c) shows the number of PSJ papers by
the theoretical framework and part of the policy cycle. All numbers come from our coding and keyword tagging of abstract
texts, papers for which we do not have abstract text are excluded from the analysis.

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policy content, as shown in Figure 1a. Indeed, this is by design, as anyone will tell you, the PSJ of today
is not the PSJ of 50 years ago (or, really, 20 years ago). PSJ has undergone a fundamental change in selec-
tivity reflected in its impact factor's significant growth. Part of this effort is reflected in a real desire by
a series of editors, beginning with Hank Jenkins- Smith, to shape the journal into a forum not just for
policy issues but specifically to develop and advance policy theory. In research design terms, our results
show the journal shifted some of its focus from dependent variables (policies) to independent variables
(policy theories).
Within the articles covering substantive policy areas, the curvilinear results in Figure 1b are likely a
function of myriad sources. Still, this may also be due to fundamental changes in policy process theory
over time. The increasing trend in the heterogeneity of policies found in PSJ began around 1990, which
corresponds with a revolution of policy process theories perhaps best represented by Sabatier's “Toward
Better Theories of the Policy Process,” published in PS: Political Science and Politics in 1991. Significant
works by policy scholars offering precursors to future theories of the policy process begin here:
Sabatier (1988) and Jenkins- Smith (1988) theorize the Advocacy Coalition Framework in a special issue
of Policy Sciences; Baumgartner and Jones (1991) preview Punctuated Equilibrium Theory in “Agenda
Dynamics and Policy Subsystems” published in the Journal of Politics; Schneider and Ingram's Social
Construction Theory goes mainstream in their 1990 Journal of Politics “Behavioral Assumption of Policy
Tools” and 1993 American Political Science Review “Social Construction of Target Populations: Implications
for Politics and Policy” articles; Pierson's (1993) Wo r l d P o l i t i c s article “When Effect Becomes Cause:
Policy Feedback and Political Change” lays the groundwork for policy feedback theory; and, of course,
Ostrom's Governing the Commons (1990) not only previews the Institutional Analysis and Development
framework but also nets a Nobel Prize.
The policy process theory revolution occurs in widely respected, general interest journals indicative
of the rigor of these theories but also previewing their reach to existing and new scholars. The PSJ
becomes a go- to location for publications in these new theories, which, as shown in Figure 3a, expands
the range of issues prospective authors bring to the journal. During this transition, PSJ essentially
published two kinds of research articles: dependent variable articles largely focused on understanding
particular policies and independent variable articles focused on advancing policy theory. As we have
shown previously, policy process theory articles are less likely to focus on topics such as labor, housing,
and community development. Yet, these were still popular with scholars using different analytic meth-
ods than the policy process. We think this likely contributes to the growth in heterogeneity between
1990 and 2005. The focus on policy theory may also partially contribute to the more recent decline in
issue heterogeneity as the journal becomes more interested in addressing advances in existing policy
theories as well as launching points for new policy theories (e.g., NPF and ecology of games) with the
same amount of space in the journal itself (reflected in Figure 1a).
Figure 1a shows that environmental policy issues are the journal's dominant category, which may
contribute to the lack of heterogeneity for two reasons. First, the ascendance of climate change as
a focus of policy scholarship and the role environmental issues play within policy theories. Climate
change is one of the dominant issues of our time and can, absent additional journal pages, crowd out
or encompass other issues. It is also a boundary- spanning issue—encompassing policy work in the en-
ergy, agricultural, natural disaster, and transportation sectors, to name just a few (Jochim & May, 2010).
Second, Figure 3 shows that while most policy theories address environmental policy (the exceptions are
PFT and SCF), some of these theories do so to the exclusion of other policy areas (e.g., ACF and IAD).
The journal has become more theoretical, and many theories it nurtures found their intellectual lineage
in addressing environmental and other “commons” problems.
IMPACT AND POLICY TOPICS
Next, we examine PSJ articles' impact on academic research and policy documents and how that
impact varies across policy topics. We measured citations of PSJ articles using data from Dimensions

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(Digital Science, 2018) and Overton.io (Szomszor & Adie, 2022). The Overton policy document
database contains over 6 million policy documents from 1661 sources across 270 countries (although
the documents from the United States comprise roughly 40 percent of the corpus) and citations from
these policy documents to over 4.5 million scientific works with DOIs (Digital Object Identifiers).
Recent work by Yin et al. (2021, 2022), Furnas et al. (2024), and Fang et al. (2020) suggest that
Overton offers the most extensive collection of policy documents and their citations to scientific
papers available to date.
We observe considerable variation in how frequently other academic articles across policy topics cite
PSJ articles. Figure 4a shows that issues addressing no substantive topic or issues addressing general the-
oretical questions related to policy- making earned more than sixty citations on average. These articles
have more than double the average academic impact than even the highest- cited policy topics. We be-
lieve these data suggest PSJ's turn toward more research on policy process theories is responsible for its
sharp increase in impact factor over the past decade. PSJ articles contribute most to academic discussion
when they concern policy processes in general rather than specific policy areas. Among policy topics,
we see a cluster of topics related to the environment receive the most citations, including environmental
regulation, resource and water management, and energy issues. Macroeconomics receives the fewest
citations.
While citations in policy documents are relatively rare, Figure 4b displays considerable variation
across policy topics. The average article received 0.75 citations in policy documents, while the average
article receiving at least one policy citation gets 2.89 citations. Both rates are in line with typical social
science benchmarks. In particular, PSJ articles on education policy receive far more policy citations than
any other topic, with more than two citations per article on average. PSJ energy policy and agriculture
articles receive comparatively more academic than policy citations. In contrast, PSJ articles on transpor-
tation, civil rights, and immigration receive comparatively more policy citations than academic citations.
Figure 4c shows that all other policy topics receive citations in policy documents roughly in proportion
to their rate of citations in academic articles.
COMPARING POLICY TOPICS IN CAP ARTICLES TO
NON- ACA DEMIC EXPERTS
Our approach also supports the comparison of PSJ articles to the production of reports by experts in
government and the think tank research community. By coding the policy content of articles in the
journal according to the standardized coding scheme of the Comparative Agendas Project, we can link
our data with previous studies of expert information provision to Congress (Fagan & McGee, 2022)
FIGUR E 4 Subfigure (a) shows the average academic citations to PSJ papers by policy topic. Bars indicate bootstrapped
95% confidence inter vals. Subfigure (b) shows the average policy document citations found in the Overton corpus for PSJ
papers by policy topic. Subfigure (c) plots the share of all academic citations to PSJ papers from papers within each topic
compared to the total policy document citat ions to PSJ papers received within each topic.

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and the outputs of think tanks (Fagan, 2024). Here, we examine the extent to which the policy focus
of papers in the PSJ aligns with, or diverges from, the policy agenda of experts outside of academia.
These outside experts offer us one benchmark to compare the attention each policy topic gets from PSJ
articles, allowing us to understand where issues are relatively under- or over- represented. This analysis
may help PSJ authors and editors make decisions about the policy topics prioritized by the journal and
policy process research community.
In Figure 5a, we plot the share of PSJ papers across topics relative to the share of Congressional
Research Service (CRS) reports across topics compiled and coded by Fagan and McGee (2022). These
reports are a measure of policymakers' “problem- solving intentions” and include “original analysis and
interpretations of policy proposals, legislation, or academic research” (Fagan & McGee, 2022). These
reports, capturing the generation of policy- related and non- partisan information for legislators, con-
centrate on defense and government operations, which do not align with PSJ papers' focus on environ-
mental policy. However, several policy topics, including immigration, labor, transportation, and energy,
display similar shares of attention. In the margins, CRS reports lean slightly more toward agriculture,
foreign affairs, and trade, while PSJ papers focus comparatively more on education, civil rights, and
“housing and community development.”
Figure 5b similarly plots PSJ papers relative to the policy content of think tank reports cataloged by
Fagan (2024). Spanning four of America's largest, party- aligned think tanks – the American Enterprise
Instit ute, Center for American Progress, Center on Budget and Pol icy Priorities, and Heritage Foundation
– these reports describe the policy information supporting the priorities of both major parties. Foreign
affairs and macroeconomics dominate the think tank agenda but are generally ignored by papers in the
PSJ. In contrast, policy scholars prioritize the environment. Alignment is closer to “space, science, and
communications,” immigration, and social welfare.
In both comparisons, we note the presence of highly divergent attention between policy process
scholars and nonacademic policy experts. Articles in the PSJ concentrate more on environmental issues
and public lands/water management, while the information generated for policymakers by think tanks
comparatively focuses on defense, foreign affairs, and macroeconomics. While overlap is present on an
array of issues receiving low- to- moderate attention levels, those issues garnering intense focus do not
align across the documents we study here. This analysis highlights the potential of using the shared cod-
ing scheme of the CAP to draw further contrasts between academic communities, government experts,
advocacy groups, and other policy actors.
FIGUR E 5 Subfigure (a) plots the share of PSJ papers within each topic compared to the share of CRS reports on each
policy topic for 1997–2019. Subfigure (b) plots the share of PSJ papers received by papers within each topic compared to the
share of think tank reports from four prominent think tanks on each policy topic for 2007–2017.

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DISCUSSION
Our data suggest PSJ has, for the most part, done a strong job of representing a wide scope of potential
topics, as well as an increase in theory development addressing no single topic. These results are impor-
tant for a journal seeking to advance generalized policy process theories. It is no coincidence that PSJ's
impact factor rose while its policy topics became more diverse (as shown in Figure 1b). However, some
issues are still underrepresented relative to meaningful benchmarks like CRS or think tank attention,
particularly on foreign policy topics, while others are overrepresented, such as environmental policy (see
Figure 5). Policy scholars and PSJ editors should consider further exploring these issues and incorporate
them into generalized policy process theories.
Our understanding of the social scientific enterprise would benefit from extending these analyses
beyond the community of policy scholars published in PSJ. Many journals seek to explain human be-
havior across issues but may test hypotheses using only a narrow range of topics. Extending the topic
coding of the scientific enterprise offers an important opportunity to measure the collective attention
of scholars to policy issues over time and across institutions, fields, and epistemic frameworks. For
example, broadly coding articles would enable scholars to examine the degree to which funders may
influence the policy agenda more generally, causing researchers or journals to overemphasize some
topics relative to others.
The approach we outline here also has implications for the use of research in policy and governance
systems. From the National Science Foundation (NSF) to philanthropic organizations like the WT
Grant Foundation, there is increasing recognition that the academy produces a large body of research
not used in policy and governance systems. Cottage industries arise to understand when, where, and why
these systems uptake research. Here, ours is an exercise in descriptive inference: on what topics and the-
oretical lines of inquiry produce research? It stands to reason that if social scientists do not produce re-
search on issues on the agendas of these systems, there will be no research uptake. Difficulties in the use
of research in collective decision- making also arise from a crowded ecological space for some of these
areas. So, the use of research is problematic where it is either sparse or over- produced. Where sparse,
the problem is one of agenda setting in the academy. When overproduced, it strains the ability of our
institutions and policy systems to prioritize the body of science, and organizational information pro-
cessing becomes increasingly important in directing attention to bodies of work (Workman et al., 2009).
ORCID
E. J. Fagan https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4432-8000
Alexander Furnas https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8006-7798
Chris Koski https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6475-4229
ENDNOTES
1DimensionsindexesallscienticmaterialwithDOIs,includingmanydocumentsthatwemightnotconsiderresearcharticles,such
as essays, letters, book reviews, etc.
2 See OpenAlex documentation for general abstract coverage trends: https:// docs. opena lex. org/ api- entit ies/ works/ work- object.
3 Forthcoming articles that were published online but not yet in an issue had a placeholder abstract in Dimensions. We looked up
andlledtheseobservationsbyhand.Otherthanthesearticles,amanualinspectionofDOIsforwhichwedonotobtainabstracts
does not indicate we are missing a large set of abstracts of PSJ papers; rather, many works appear to not have digitized abstracts
available for collection by OpenAlex prior to 1991.
4 The initial two coders agreed on 86% of observations.
5 Theviridisscaleusedforthehueinthese guresisaccessibleforreaderswithcommonformsof  colorblindnessandispercep-
tually uniform across values (i.e., similar values appear consistently across the full range of the scale) both in its color form and
whenconvertedtograyscale.Furthermore,gureswithoutalabeledaxisaredualencoded,wherecellsareassignedbothahueand
a direct label to ensure accessibility should readers struggle with interpreting the gradations in hue.
6 Weare remindedof  DeLeon'sadvicein therst editionof  theTheories of the Policy Process not to “discard an old friend” when
thinking about the utility of the stages heuristic (DeLeon, 1999, p. 29).

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AUTHOR BIOGRAPHIES
E. J. Fagan is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of
Illinois at Chicago. His research focuses on the role of expertise, information processing and polit-
ical institutions in the policy process. He is the author of The Thinkers: The Rise of Partisan Think
Tanks and the Polarization of American Politics (Oxford University Press, 2024).
Chris Koski is the Daniel B. Greenberg Professor of Political Science and Environmental Studies at
Reed College in Portland, Oregon. He researches policy process theory, particularly agenda- setting
and policy design, in public budgeting and climate policy. He is co- author of Means, Motives, and
Opportunities: How Executives and Interest Groups Set Public Policy (Cambridge University Press, 2024) and
co- editor of The Real World of American Politics: A Documentary Introduction (Rowman and Littlefield,
2022).
Alexander Furnas is a Research Assistant Professor at the Center for Science of Science
and Innovation and the Ryan Institue on Complexity in the Kellogg School of Management,
Northwestern University. He specializes in the role of information and expertise in the policy-
making process.
Herschel Thomas is an Associate Professor of Public Affairs at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of
Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. His research focuses on the role of civil society
in shaping public policy decision- making and outcomes, with an emphasis on interest group politics,
public health, and agenda- setting. He is a co- author of Revolving Door Lobbying (University Press of
Kansa s , 2017).
Samuel Workman is Professor of political science and Director of the Institute for Policy
Research and Public Affairs at West Virginia University. His area of expertise is constructing
large data infrastructures to answer fundamental questions about public policy across time and
space. His work appears in the top journals in public policy and public administration. He is the
author of The Dynamics of Bureaucracy (Cambridge, 2015) and Co- Editor of Methods of the Policy Process
(Routledge, 2022).
Corinne Connor is a Program Analyst at the Heinz Foundation. She received her MA in Political
Science from West Virginia University in 2023.

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SUPPORTING INFORM ATION
Additional supporting information can be found online in the Supporting Information section at the
end of this article.
How to cite this article: Fagan, E. J., Alexander Furnas, Chris Koski, Herschel Thomas,
Samuel Workman and Corinne Connor. 2024. “The Dynamics of Issue Attention in Policy
Process Scholarship.” Policy Studies Journal 52 (3): 481–492. https://doi.org/10.1111/psj.12548.