• The ari.org.uk dataset

    An important caveat – we’re still cleaning up the data While the ARI database is live we’re still actively working on / curating the metadata for some questions. Wrangling data previously kept in Word files and PDFs by lots of different stakeholders is often messy; the ARI data is no…

  • Release notes for 2023

    A list of recent data updates, fixes and new product functionality We update this page regularly with details of the important data updates, fixes and new features added to Overton. An easy way to keep up to date is to sign up for our newsletter, which will highlight any major changes…

  • What are “data notes”?

    Data notes appear at the bottom of search results on some screens. Overton uses them to make users aware of possible limitations and biases in the data. We work hard to make the data in Overton as accurate and complete as possible, but limitations and possible biases still exist. You…

  • How does Overton know who authored a scholarly article?

    Details how Overton finds author names for the scholarly books and papers cited by policy documents When Overton finds a reference to a scholarly work in a policy document it creates an item for it in the Scholarly Articles tab. That item contains the scholarly work’s title, journal (if applicable!),…

  • Minimum hardware requirements

    What are the minimum hardware requirements for accessing Overton? Web application While there are no minimum hardware requirements per se for accessing the Overton web application you will need a device capable of running a modern web browser. Official supported browsers are: Chrome Firefox Edge Safari Opera We support versions…

  • Allowing Overton access to your website

    How to configure Cloudflare and other middleware to allow Overton’s scrapers access to your website Overton automatically checks for updates to your publication pages, so that we can see when new documents are published and start tracking them. If you’re a publisher and want to use Overton then it’s important…

  • Why are some authors not appearing in the People tab?

    If a name doesn’t return any matches or fewer citations than expected in the People tab there may still be other information about that author’s works in the database Data based on citations gets into the People tab after a two-step process: We extract scholarly references from policy documents and…

  • Benchmarking %age cited in policy

    How Overton benchmarks the percentage of documents in a set that are cited in policy Given a large set of articles it can be helpful to know if the %age of articles cited in policy matches what you might expect – what’s “normal”. But determining expectations is difficult as it…

  • How does Overton find citation contexts?

    When Overton finds a reference to a scholarly output in a policy document we try to show you where in the text it is being used, like so: We do something very similar for citations to other policy documents. We call these citation contexts. Citation contexts in more detail The…

  • Site-specific identifiers in Overton

    How to use other identifiers like DOIs or catalog numbers for documents in the Overton database When Overton collects documents from a policy document source it focuses on basic metadata like titles, authors and publication dates. However on request it’s possible for us to also collect site specific IDs, like…