ScERG: Scientific Evidence in Regulation and Governance

We collected Regulatory Impact Analyses (RIAs) for all economically significant regulations from 2008-2012, excluding transfer and budget regulations. The RIA’s were accessed from the materials collected and made available online through the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. For each of the RIA’s, trained research assistants extracted citations to outside literature. Because the RIA’s are performed by individual agencies without standardized formatting, the research assistants are required to read through the entire RIA’s – sometimes running to hundreds of pages – to extract the individual citations. The RIA’s vary significantly in length and complexity, as well as by the number and type of citations. Scholarly citation counts for the RIA’s sampled range from 0 to 134, with a median of 6 and mean of 7.45. Among the 122 RIA’s, there are a total of 909 citations to scholarly publications.