*3.3. Research Areas*

3.3.1. Identification of the Research Areas of the Studies

When classifying the research areas to which the analyzed texts belonged, we used the WoS Research Areas label, which was assigned to each journal publishing the analyzed texts (every record in the Web of Science core collection contains the subject category of its source publication, assigned to at least one of the subject categories). Figure 7 shows in which WoS Research Areas the texts were published in the analyzed period.

**Figure 7.** The WoS Research Areas assigned to the journals publishing the analyzed texts (percentage per year).

We observe that in the first year covered by the analysis (2012), the studied texts belonged to only two research areas, which also happened to be closely related (i.e., information science and computer science), whereas in the subsequent years (with the exception of year 3) the number of research areas systematically grew, reaching its peak in 2017 (17 research areas), and almost maintaining this high level in 2018 and 2020 (16 research areas).

#### 3.3.2. Grouping the Identified Research Areas

For the sake of the clarity of the analysis, we have grouped the emerging research areas into five research area groups (RAGs) as shown in Table 12. We have paid special attention to two general areas that we found of particular importance to the studied topic, here separated into broad categories: (1) computer science, information science and related and (2) political sciences and related. Other research areas in which the references to CI in policymaking appeared were gathered into three groups: (3) humanities and social sciences

other than political sciences, (4) natural sciences and mathematics, and (5) applied sciences. In some cases, one article was assigned to more than one research area because it belonged to multiple disciplines according to the Web of Science classification. This was the case for 32 articles of 88 analyzed.

**Table 12.** Research area groups, grouping the WoS research areas, within which the studies on CI in policymaking were conducted in the 2012–2020 period.

