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: Some source types (e.g. NGOs engaging in policy work) are considered for inclusion on a case by case basis. We look at:…
A description of how Overton finds scholarly references in full text Policy documents don’t always – or even often – have a clearly laid out references section or bibliography, and typically don’t stick to a single referencing style like a more academic work would. This means that Overton has to…
Where does the data in the Journal Subjects facet come from? We get information on the journals that research articles belong to from CrossRef, which is a common metadata database run by the scholarly publishing community. We enrich this data with journal subjects from Scopus, specifically the Scopus Subject areas…
Describes how policy documents are linked to different SDGs Please note: this functionality was updated and improved in March 2025. If you would like more information on how we previously linked policy documents to SDGs there is more information here. As well as topics and subject areas Overton tries to…
Overton gets funding data from Funder Registry (OFR), Europe PMC and Gateway to Research Overton allows you to see where scholarly articles funded by a given organization are being cited in policy. But how do we know which articles are funded by who? Accurate information about who has funded what…
How Overton tries to avoid collecting the same document multiple times Policy documents usually lack identifiers like ISBNs or DOIs that can be used to uniquely identify them, no matter where they are hosted. This can pose a problem when government websites change and documents are moved to different web…
Overton automatically extracts topics from policy documents, and you can see these on individual document pages and in the API or Excel output. But you might notice that when we list topics in the filter boxes on the left hand side they aren’t in order: some topics appear lower down…
There isn’t a broadly accepted, pragmatic definition of what a “policy document” is – in the context of Overton we define them very broadly as documents written primarily for or by policymakers that are published by a policy focused source. We’re interested in not just the policy or legislation itself…
What is Overton Index? Our mission is to help users find, understand, and measure their influence on government policy. Overton is the world’s largest policy and grey literature database. We index policy documents from around the world and make them full-text searchable. Our collection includes policy documents, parliamentary transcripts, government…
Users can search for people’s names in Overton to see if an individual has been cited or mentioned in policy. Below are some hints on how to search for people. Video: Search for people in Overton The author name data we get in Overton ultimately comes from publishers and is…