Stunning Partisan Divide in How US Lawmakers Cite Science

A new analysis of hundreds of thousands of policy documents reveals a striking difference in how US political parties use scientific literature. Democrat-led congressional committees and left-leaning think tanks are far more likely to cite research papers than their Republican counterparts. The study also found Democrats and left-leaning groups are more likely to cite high-impact research, and both sides rarely cite the same studies or topics. The research, published in Science, shows that documents from Democrat-controlled committees were almost 1.8 times more likely to cite science than those from Republican-led committees.