Bibliography of social sciences publications discussing the IPCC or its outputs

This bibliography has been composed by searching and collecting bibliographic records from three main scientific abstract and citation databases, with the cut-off date May 2025: Scopus, Web of Science (WOS) and OpenAlex (OA). Search queries were adapted to each database to narrow down results to social science/humanities research and/or the study of social aspects of the IPCC. This was followed by a manual and iterative sorting of records to narrow the corpus down to those publications that offered some type of explicit analysis or discussion of the IPCC as an “epistemic, cultural, political [and/or] human knowledge institution” (De Pryck and Hulme, 2022), of the IPCC assessment process and/or of IPCC outputs. Records which addressed climate change and/or the IPCC from a natural science or engineering perspective were excluded, retaining only those research articles, commentaries, chapters and books, peer-reviewed or not, that primarily focused on the IPCC and/or use the IPCC as a case study (including among other cases). Given the large amount of initial search results (more than 5000 results across the three databases), we divided the manual sorting of records among the co-authors. Upon completion of the first round of sorting, each co-author cross-checked other co-authors’ results. Where sorting results were unclear or differed among co-authors, we discussed and made a final sorting decision as a group. It is, however, known that bibliographic databases are partial to publications in English and from the Global North (simply because their records are more easy to digitally harvest). Despite the co-authors’ best efforts, the bibliography may lack a number of less visible or less accessible publications. Except for a handful of publications, all selected records were covered in the OpenAlex. We therefore used OpenAlex's application programming interface (API) to extract the metadata about the publication years, sources, type, authors, countries of affiliation, topics, subfield, language and number of citations for each publication (the extraction was updated in October 2025). OA’s coverage has proven quite accurate (i.e. offering metadata for almost all publications), though not entirely free from classic problems with bibliographic databases, such as lack of affiliation information for some authors, double affiliations for others, overlapping of fields and topics.