Users can search for people’s names in Overton to see if an individual has been cited or mentioned in policy. Below are some hints on how to search for people.
Video: Search for people in Overton
The author name data we get in Overton ultimately comes from publishers and is a mix of full first names, initials and middle initials.
To get the complete picture for an author you’ll want to try and find all of their name variants.
To make this easy Overton tries to intelligently match name variants for the queries you give it on the Search People tab.
To get more matches replace the firstname in your search with the first initial.
Here’s what happens behind the scenes when you search for a name:
Step 1: Query clean-up
If there’s a comma after the first word we assume that’s the last name, and the rest is the first name. We’ll rewrite your query to be in Firstname Lastname format e.g.
Smith, Alice Gwill be changed to:
Alice G Smith Step 2: The actual query
If it’s one word we search for it inside any name parts e.g.
Smithwill match
Alice Smith
Mr Smithers
Robert Smith
… If the first word is one letter long we treat it as an first initial e.g.
A Smithwill match
A Smith
Alice Smith
Arthur Smith
Alice B Smith
… If it’s two words (and the first isn’t a nobiliary particle – e.g. the Von in “Von Bismarck”) then we’ll also match anything in between them e.g.
Alice Smithwill match
Alice Smith
Alice B Smith
Searching using DOIs
If you are searching for one specific author and have a reliable, up to date list of their scholarly publications, you can search the list of DOIs from their publications in our ‘Scholarly
Articles’ search tab.
Then use the ‘Explore’ option to see the Policy Documents citing that authors’ scholarly work.