Psychological research is increasingly cited in U.S. policy documents especially for education, health and social justice issues

Understanding how scientific research informs policy is central to the social sciences, yet systematic evidence of this process remains limited. Bearing in mind that uses can take many different forms, we present a large-scale analysis of how psychological research is cited in U.S. policy documents between 2000 and 2022 to examine one pathway of research uptake in the public sphere. Curating a large data pool linking policy documents (N = 175,987) to social science papers they referenced (N = 1,124,466), we first find that psychological research was cited at consistently higher—and rapidly growing—rates compared to other social sciences. Next, a logistic regression comparing psychology papers (N = 61,521) cited by policy documents versus psychology papers not cited by policy documents (N = 1,672,748) identified paper-level features associated with increased odds of being cited by policy documents, such as coverage by mass media (OR = 1.23) and funding from the NIH (OR = 1.14). Additionally, a structural topic model on the cited research reveals that papers focused on applied topics are associated with more citations in policy documents, though not necessarily with more citations within academia. Finally, using network and computational text analysis, we find that policy documents citing psychology most often address education, health, and social justice issues. Together, these results offer an empirical foundation and methodological framework for understanding an important, public, and traceable pathway in which research translates into policy uptake. Using a large-scale dataset linking U.S. policy documents to cited social science papers, this study traces psychology’s policy uptake from 2000–2022 and identifies the paper features, topics, and policy issues most associated with use