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Understanding Excel exports

Contents

Exporting results from the ‘Search Policy Documents’ tab to Excel provides detailed data about the policy documents in the results set.

Excel exports are currently capped at the first 1,200 policy document results as these types of exports are computationally expensive to produce. CSV exports are a better option for larger result sets.

Please visit ‘Differences Between Excel and CSV Exports‘ for a comparison of how export data points and columns differ.

Excel Export Features

Excel export files have 4 sheets that include

  • Search details
  • Results
  • Matched References
  • Data Notes

The “Results” tab

Here is an Excel export showing the categories of information found in “Results” tab. In this tab, you will find details about the policy documents in your results set.

  1. Title is the title of the policy document
  2. Translated Title is an English translation of titles that are in other languages
  3. Thumbnail is the image web address of the policy document
  4. Snippet is the abstract of the policy document
  5. AI Generated Document Description includes the longer description of the policy document
  6. Published is the date of publication of the policy document
  7. URL is the web address for the policy document
  8. PDF URL is web address for the specific policy document PDF (some documents have multiple PDFs).
  9. Source ID is policy source identifier
  10. Source name is name of policy source where Overton found the policy document
  11. Source country is the country where the policy source is located (note: IGO and EU are included as countries)
  12. Source Sector includes public (government), private (corporate), or third sector (nonprofits, NGOs)
  1. Source Organisation Type is the policy source category (government, IGO, or think tank)
  2. Source Function is the specific function of the policy source
  3. Overton ID is the unique ID Overton assigned to the policy document
  4. Policy document type is the document type
  5. Policy document authors is the organisation or individual who authored the policy document
  6. Policy document DOIs will be populated if the policy document has been assigned a DOI
  7. Your tags will be populated if you have tagged the document
  8. Top topics describe what the policy document is about
  9. Citations refers to how many times the document has been cited by other policy documents
  10. Citations (same source) refers to citations from policy documents, including those citations from the same source
  11. Languages shows the language(s) a document is written in
  12. Related to SDGs shows which of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals and Targets a policy document is related to.

The “Matched References” tab

Here is an Excel export showing the categories of data found in the “Matched References” tab.

In this tab, you will see details about the policy document results in the first few columns. In the columns that begin with “Matched” you will find information about the cited document (i.e., research output or policy document) or person mention. As the “Matched References” tab provides you with data about each citation in your results set, you can use the data from this tab to get a citation count.

“Matched References” tab
  1. Title is the title of the policy document
  2. Translated Title is an English translation of titles that are in other languages
  3. Published is the date of publication of the policy document
  4. Source Name is name of source that produced the policy document
  5. Source Sector includes public (government), private (corporate), or third sector (nonprofits, NGOs)
  6. Source Organisation Type is the policy source category (government, IGO, or think tank)
  7. Source Function is the specific function of the policy source
  8. URL is the web address for the policy document
  9. PDF URL is web address for the specific policy document PDF (some documents have multiple PDFs).
  10. Overton ID is is the unique ID Overton assigned to the policy document
  11. Policy document DOIs will be populated if the policy document has been assigned a DOI
  12. PDF document ID is the unique identifier assigned to a PDF within a policy document (some policy “documents” like reports, may have multiple PDFs that are part of the same document).
  1. Matched Reference Type distinguishes if a reference is a citation or a mention
  2. Matched News ID is populated if the matched reference is from a news article
  3. Matched Policy Document ID is populated if the matched reference is from a policy document
  4. Matched DOI is the DOI for the article which was cited in the policy document
  5. Matched person is populated if the reference is a mention of a person in a policy document
  6. Page is the page number in the policy document where the citation or mention appears
  7. Matched snippet shows the context of the citation or mention within the policy document
  8. Matched policy document title is populated if the document cited is another policy document
  9. Matched Departments
Updated on December 17, 2025
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