While effective foreign and national security policy-making increasingly requires research that is produced outside government, little is known about how such research affects the actions of policy-makers, or why it may or may not be "policy-relevant" to them. This essay poses a number of criteria which can be used to weigh the policy relevance of "applied" social science research for national security and foreign policy issues. These criteria can be divided into content and process categories, the former including aspects of time, issue salience, format, and confidence; and the latter incorporating questions related to the origin of research, the strategy which informs it, and the tactics by which it is presented. Hopefully, such criteria can be applied to existing works, serve as guidelines for future research, and perhaps illuminate the general role of "social knowledge" in policy formulation.