This guide will help you get started with your Overton Index trial, supporting you to investigate how your research influences policy and discover relevant policy and grey literature for your research.
We’ll cover the essentials so you can start using Overton Index straight away.
5 Tips for Success
- Create an account to unlock customisations and features
- Attend the demo for your trial or join an Overton 101 webinar
- Review your account’s ‘Example searches’ and see what Overton can do
- Use our Advanced Query Builder for complex keyword searches
- Contact Support to get help and ask questions
Discover your policy impact
This section is geared towards individuals. Use these resources to learn about institutional impact:
You can use Overton Index to see where policy documents cite your research and where they mention you.
Together, citations and mentions help create a more complete picture of policy influence, providing you with essential data that you can use for research assessment activities, to strengthen grant applications, to report on funding, and to support applications for tenure and promotion.
Find your citations in policy documents
Search with DOIs
DOI search is the gold standard at Overton because it provides a reliable way to identify when scholarly works are cited in policy documents. Overton supports searching with DOIs, PMIDs, and ISBNs. You can also search using ORCID in the Scholarly Articles search.
Finding citations of publications in policy, both individual or groups of your publications
- Help page: Search using DOIs and other identifiers
Search using your name in the People search
Overton’s People search allows you to search using your name to find policy citations and mentions.
Works best for people with less common name or fewer affiliations. Learn more about best practices in using the People search by viewing our Help article “Using Overton’s People Search”
- Help page: Using Overton’s People Search
- Help page: Authors with no People results & alternative searches
Search for cited publications using keywords
You can also search for publications cited in policy by the title of a published work.
Search for an individual title to find out if it has been cited.
- Help page: Using Overton’s Advanced search
Search for cited publications that don’t have DOIs
Sometimes published scholarly works do not have DOIs or other identifiers. In order to search for citations in policy for these publications, you will need to search Overton using a combination of keywords and other search strategies.
Any scholarly publication that does not have a DOI or other identifier.
- Help page: Using Overton’s Advanced search
Search using your Overton Profile
Profile users can set-up and upload all their publications to and then use for finding policy citations. Note, you will need to first set-up your Overton Profile to use the search feature.
Anyone who wants to be able to easily search and track their own publication citations in policy documents.
- Help page: Setting up your Overton Profile
- Help page: Search using your Overton Profile
Find your mentions in policy documents
Search for mentions of your name using the People search
A People mention is when your name alongside your institutional affiliation was found somewhere in the full-text of a policy document. While not a citation, it can still give an indication of important policy impact. Overton tracks mentions of people through the People search when there is enough metadata to verify people and their affiliations.
Anyone interested to see where they may have been mentioned in policy documents.
- Help page: Using Overton’s People Search
- Help page: What is a People mention?
- Help page: How does Overton find people mentioned in policy documents?
Search for mentions of your name in the full-text
A mention is when your name was found somewhere in the full-text of a policy document. While not a citation, it can still give an indication of important policy impact. Overton tracks mentions of people through the People search when there is enough metadata to verify people and their affiliations. If there isn’t enough metadata, you may have no People mentions but you can still search the full-text for your name.
Individuals who do not have People mentions but think they would be mentioned in policy or anyone that wants to ensure they are finding all possible mentions.
- Help page: What is a People mention?
- Help page: How does Overton find people mentioned in policy documents?
- Help page: Using Overton’s Advanced search
Monitor impact with saved searches and email alerts
This step-by-step will guide you to set up saved searches and email alerts so you can track your policy impact more easily.
Discover policy and grey literature
Use Overton to search and discover insights across more than 23 million policy documents from over 2,700 policy sources worldwide.
Systematically explore policy and grey literature to find policy on a topic, strengthen your scholarship, and support rigorous research, including systematic and scoping reviews.
Search for policy and grey literature
Find policy on a topic using keywords and search strategies
Overton is a full-text search which allows you to search for policy documents on topics using keywords and various search strategies. Our Advanced Query Builder will help guide you through creating an effective keyword search for both simple and complex queries.
Finding policy on specific topics for research.
- Help page: Using Overton’s Advanced Search
Find policy from a specific source or source type
You are able to search for policy documents by the policy author or through the different categorizations of the policy documents, such as source type. This workflow will show you how you can search by source or by source type but you can apply other filters to find specific groupings of policy documents for your search.
Finding policy documents from specific sources or source types.
- Help page: How does Overton classify its sources?
- Product news: Overton’s data index
Find policy with semantic similarity
Search mode which allows you to search for policy documents that are similar in meaning and context to your search terms, rather than just matching keywords.
Finding policy documents that have contextual similarity to your search term(s).
- Help page: Searching for similar policy documents
- Help page: AI generated document descriptions in Overton Index
Overton Engage trial
If your organisation is also trialing Overton Engage, please review the following guidance.
First steps with Overton Engage
- If your institution is trialling Overton Engage, click on Engage.
- You will be prompted to complete a profile consisting of a brief bio and a curated list of your publications.
- View “My matches” to see policy engagement opportunities that match your research expertise. You may refine further by country or other filters.
- Institutions that subscribe to Overton Index only receive access to the free version of Overton Engage, which includes basic keyword searching but does not include profiles, saved searches, or email alerts.
Learn more
Want to do a deeper dive into what Overton is all about?
You can learn more about Overton - how to uncover policy impact and discover policy for research and teaching - using our library of resources. Here is a selection of resources to get you started.
Blog
- What is a policy citation?
- Why doesn’t Overton provide an ‘o-index’?
- Characteristics of Overton’s data
- How to connect, assess, and present the societal impact of your research
- Using Overton to enhance funding and grant applications
- How Maastricht is advocating for inclusive research and decolonisation