How can policy document mentions to scholarly papers be interpreted? An analysis of the underlying mentioning process

Policy document mentions are useful for assessing the societal impact of scholarly papers. However, how policy document mentions can be interpreted is unclear yet. In this study, content analysis was used to examine features (mentioned element, mentioning form, and mentioning location) and motivations of policy document mention to scholarly papers. 885 policy documents were sampled for analysis from the Altmetric.com database. Results reveal that: (1) The mentioned elements of policy document mentions can be divided as five categories, summarized content (26.9%) is the most frequent one. (2) We found five types of the mentioning form of policy document mentions, the major mentioning form is references (72.3%). (3) The mentioning locations in policy documents can be divided into twelve categories, expounding (47.4%) and review (22.6%) are the core mentioning locations. (4) Motivation of policy document mentions can be broken down into five major categories and seventeen minor categories, more than 30% of motivations are to support the policy argument by listing relevant work. Analysis of the mention features of the policy document mentions gives us another way to understand how it works and how policy document mentions are motivated, with these findings we can do more work to find out the relationship between scientific articles and policy documents.