Summary reports for policy documents

When you run a search in the ‘Search Policy Documents and Grey Literature’ search, you can view the results in the app or as a summary report. A summary report provides a more visual representation of a set of search results.

Video: Summary reports for policy document results

Generate a summary report

Once you have a set of search results, click on ‘See report’ in the grey action bar above the search results to generate a summary report.

Reading a summary report

Document count

Number of policy documents in the result set

Countries

Number of countries where the policy documents came from

Sources

Number of policy sources (where the policy documents are from) in the results set

World map

This map displays where the policy sources come from. The size of the dot corresponds with the number of policy documents from that country

Document types

Number and types of documents in the results set

Source specific tags

Refers to labels assigned to some groups of policy documents

Publication years

Number of policy documents published by year

Funders of cited research

Lists all the funders of the research cited in the policy documents in the results set

Policy source types

This is a breakdown of policy documents by source category (government, IGO, or think tank). All policy documents have an assigned source type.

Subtypes

This is a breakdown of policy documents by policy source subtype (note: not all policy documents have a subtype so the numbers may not match to the parent policy source category).

Policy sources

List of the policy sources where the policy documents in the results came from

Cited journals

List of the journals that published the research cited in the policy document results

Cited publishers

List of the academic publishers that published the research cited in the policy document results

Policy topics

List of main themes (topics) extracted from the policy documents in the results set and the number of policy documents for each topic area (note: a policy document can have multiple topics).

Cited institutions

List of the institutions or organisations connected to the authors of the cited research found in the policy document results set

Policy classifications

List of subject areas that the policy documents in the results set fall under

Policy SDG categories

List of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals and the number of policy documents in the results set which align to each goal

Summary reports can be shared publicly by URL, making it easy to collaborate with colleagues who do not have an Overton account. See ‘Sharing search results’ for step-by-step sharing instructions.

Exporting summary reports

You can view a summary report of your search results by clicking ‘See Report’ in the grey bar above the search results.

From the Report page, you can copy the different sections to your clipboard to create a CSV, or save the image. You can also share the report via a custom link or print the report to PDF.