ArticleSTAR protocols2026
COVID-19 education policy often relied on older research despite available new evidence.
Article in STAR protocols, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
0 citing papers in PubMed.
No citing paper in PubMed yet.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Policymakers are increasingly relying on scientific research, but it remains unclear whether policy decisions reflect the latest available evidence. Building on a previously developed semantic matching approach, we use pretrained language-model embeddings to identify newer studies that are substantively related to research cited in policy documents. We then examine whether these related studies were already available before the policy documents were published. Applied to COVID-19 education policy, the analysis shows that policy documents often continued to cite established pre-pandemic research even when similar post-2020 studies had already been published. This pattern suggests that policy decisions do not always keep pace with newly available research. The approach provides a scalable way to diagnose how quickly policy systems incorporate emerging evidence across domains.
Indexed as
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What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.