Small research ecosystems in large international public policies: tracing an infrastructurally mediated pathway from CroRIS to Overton

Policy document citations are increasingly used to evidence the societal impact of research, yet we know little about how such indicators operate in small research systems. We conceptualize policy citation visibility as an infrastructurally mediated pathway that links Croatia’s national CRIS (CroRIS), which provides PID- and CERIF-based provenance of outputs, with Overton, which records downstream policy mentions. We focus on research authored by scholars at Croatian public universities and research institutes and its visibility in Overton-indexed policy documents. Our analyses are based on a CroRIS-affiliated, Overton-retrievable, DOI-available subset of 6,022 publications and 16,330 policy citation events to these articles, and therefore capture policy visibility under specific infrastructural conditions. We examine citation distributions by journal subject area, institutional affiliation, access type (open vs. closed), and the geographical and organisational origins of citing bodies. Fields with direct societal relevance, especially public health, environment, and sustainability, dominate among cited works. Open access is common among policy-cited Croatian articles, although a substantial share of frequently cited outputs remains closed. Most citations originate from European and international organisations, while Croatian government documents rarely cite domestic research and those that do are concentrated in a small number of ministries.