Video – Introduction to Overton
In this short video, you will learn what Overton is, what data is available and how to get started using the platform.
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Using policy related metrics responsibly in research assessment
- eadie
Important things to know if you’re planning to use metrics or indicators based on Overton’s data Overton’s search and filtering capability makes it quick and easy to find policy documents authored by your academics or citing your institution’s research. Often you’ll want to focus on the qualitative aspects of the…
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Overton’s data in bullet points
- eadie
Briefly covers Overton’s data and how it differs from other policy tracking systems Overton is the world’s largest database of policy documents (“documents written primarily for or by policymakers”) and the relationships between them. We systematically add sources that meet our minimum criteria and in response to user requests. We…
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Documents in different languages
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What languages does Overton support? Overton is largely language agnostic Overton is largely language agnostic (with some caveats – see below) and documents are indexed, analyzed and made available for search regardless of the language or alphabet that they’re written in. To make browsing easier, document titles (data in the…
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What sources does Overton track?
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More information on the types and geographic focus of the sources in Overton Overton tracks more than a thousand different sources of policy documents from 180+ different countries. New documents from those sources are automatically added to the database. If you’re logged in to Overton then you can see a…
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How far back does the database go?
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Does Overton contain only recent policy or older documents too? The quick but rough way to answer this is to log in to the app, go to the “Policy” tab and apply any filters you’re interested in (government documents only, from South America, central banks only etc.) and then run…
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How international are your sources?
- eadie
Information on the countries and regions that Overton collected data from We set out to try and make a global policy database and around one hundred and eighty countries are represented in the database, with documents in dozens of languages, though the number of documents from some locations is very…
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What is Overton’s coverage and how does it compare to other systems?
- eadie
More information on the number of sources and documents we collect Overton indexes more than 12M documents from more than 1700 different policy sources, making it many times larger than similar systems. For example in August 2021 the policy component of Dimensions/Altmetric contained ~ 2.6M citations of DOIs in policy…
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About topics, entities and subject areas
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Information on the taxonomies that Overton uses to map topics, entities and subject areas to policy documents Overton uses machine learning techniques to extract topics and entities from the full text of each policy document we index, and then tries to map them to a taxonomy to make browsing and…
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What are your criteria for adding new sources?
- eadie
How new policy sources are identified and assessed How do you decide what is and isn’t included? The majority of sources that we track meet our minimum criteria: They are official government sources, think tanks, or IGOs They regularly publish policy documents (as we define them) The documents that they…