How the system evolved in 2021 Please note: this is an older page, you can find the current set of release notes here This page lists the important data updates, fixes and new features that we added to Overton over the course of 2021. An easy way to keep up…
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…
A brief description of how we find researcher names in the full text of policy documents Overton tracks where it sees a researcher’s name in policy documents, in addition to processing any citations to other policy or scholarly outputs. We call these “people mentions”. Finding people mentions in a policy…
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 this doesn’t work and we’re unable to determine what the correct publication date is. This…
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 practice 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…
A quickstart guide to Overton’s JSON API (Note: for large projects or where you need to get at a lot of data quickly the data snapshots may be a better option.) The data in Overton is available in a machine readable format using our REST API, which sits in-between our…
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…
A description of Overton’s bulk data snapshot format Data snapshots give you access to the Overton database in machine readable form so that you can import it into your own database or BI system. Each snapshot is a tar.gz file containing a set of JSONL files containing document metadata and…