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 is still in beta. While we think the results are good enough to use in analyses note that the classifier does not ever assign SDGs 9, 12 or 17, and we’re still experimenting with ways to improve…
Overton gets funding data from FundRef, 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 research is…
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? Our mission is to help users find, understand, and measure their influence on government policy. Overton is the world’s largest collection of policy documents, parliamentary transcripts, government guidance and think tank research. We make this data available through the Overton.io web application, reports and an API. Our…
Tips for searching for people by name The author name data we get in Overton ultimately comes from publishers and is a mix of full first names, initials and middle initials. To get the complete picture for an author you’ll want to try and find all of their name variants….
How the system evolved in 2022 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 2022. An easy way to keep up to…