Review by quality not quantity for better policy

摘要

Society increasingly demands that policies are based on scientific evidence, as it should. Yet policy-makers rarely refer to journal papers - the actual evidence - instead preferring to base decisions on summaries, reviews and assessments. Such assessments can be deeply influential but fallible: the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has effectively underpinned climate-change policies worldwide, yet the infamous Himalayan glacier blunder in the 2007 report is still regularly unearthed to taunt the IPCC's authority.