What is Overton?
Our mission is to help users find, understand, and measure their influence on government policy.
Overton is the world’s largest collection of policy documents, parliamentary transcripts, government guidance and think tank research.
We make this data available through the Overton.io web application, reports and an API.
Our users include funders, universities, academic journals and journalists. If you’re interested in getting access then please contact us.
Making policy discoverable
We collect data globally from 188+ countries and territories and in many different languages. There are over 12M documents indexed in Overton, and hundreds of new documents are added each day.
We index these documents to make them searchable, organize them into categories and analyze them to extract key terms and topics.
We then map the connections between them, scholarly research and the news media, giving insight into the evidence and influences that are shaping the world around us.
You can easily restrict searches to specific regions, countries or source types – for example, to just documents from public health agencies, or from government sources in Australasia.
Other filters allow you to view policy that cites research from a particular university, think tank, or academic.
Mapping influence on policy
Part of our mission is to help users measure their influence on government policy, both locally and internationally.
If you fund, publish or produce research, Overton can show you where it has been cited in policy worldwide.
Because Overton also tracks think tanks, NGOs and other knowledge brokers it can also show where a piece of research has been picked up by an influential policy brief or report that then in turn is picked up in official policy (we call these “second order” policy citations).
All this information can be explored in the web app, exported to Excel or saved as pre-made reports ready to share with authors and other stakeholders.
Use the data as a basis for identifying or evidencing impact case studies, to add policy influence indicators to annual reports or to find possible grantees or collaborators.