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…
A list of recent data updates, fixes and new product functionality
Details how Overton links scholarly books and articles back to specific researchers and their institutions Overton gets affiliation data from OpenAlex, an open database of scholarly metadata for books and papers. OpenAlex in turn inherited historical affiliation data from Microsoft Academic, which is what Overton used before it closed in…
Information on who funds and builds Overton Overton was built and is maintained and updated by Open Policy Ltd, a UK company based in London. Overton is the company’s main product and sometimes we trade under that name. We’re a bootstrapped start-up – we don’t have any external investors and…
In addition to processing any citations to other policy or scholarly outputs, Overton tracks where it finds a researchers name in the full-text of a policy documents. We call these “People Mentions”. See: What is a People mention? How Overton finds People mentions Finding people mentions in a policy document…
This article explains how Overton handles errors in publication dates. By default Overton collects the publication date of each policy document either from its source website or the PDF of the policy document itself. Occasionally we’re unable to determine what the correct publication date is. This can happen if the…
Following best practice will help researchers, tools and the public find your publications. To make sure your publications are properly indexed by Overton and other search indexes, like Google Scholar, it is important to follow web publishing best practices wherever possible. Ensure publication pages show dates, titles and download links…
Discover Overton’s criteria for collecting documents from an indexed source Overton has a broad definition of a policy document: “documents written primarily for or by policymakers” … and collects from a wide range of different sources. But we don’t collect everything from these sources: we manually curate each one and…
The data in the Overton Index is available in a machine-readable format through our REST API, which sits between our database and the web application. The API returns JSON and requires an API key. This article will cover how to access and the API and interpret results. For our technical…
How “PDF” and “Policy document” objects in the snapshots and APIs are related and what metadata is shared between them In the Overton web interface every Policy document object is made up of one or more PDF objects. How Overton parses publication landing pages Imagine a publication landing page representing…