How new policy sources are identified and assessed
How do you decide what is and isn’t included?
The majority of sources that we track meet our minimum criteria:
- They are official government sources, think tanks, or IGOs
- They regularly publish policy documents (as we define them)
- The documents that they publish are publicly available
Some source types (e.g. NGOs engaging in policy work) are considered for inclusion on a case by case basis. We look at:
- Is the source often cited by official documents?
- Do they cite research or other policy documents?
- Do they regularly publish documents of interest, or just on an ad hoc basis? If the latter, are the documents published ever cited?
- Are the documents publicly available?
If you’re logged in to Overton then you can see a complete list of sources on the Sources page. Users can request adding a specific source by emailing support.
How do you identify sources?
We spend a lot of time adding and maintaining policy sources inside Overton but there’s always more to collect.
We maintain a large list of candidate sources and the team picks new sources to add weekly.
New candidates are added because they’ve been requested by users, because they’re being cited by other policy documents or because they belong to a category we’ve identified as a priority (“East African government sources” “Environmental protection agencies” etc.)