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 OpenAlex Overton allows you to see where scholarly articles funded by a given organisation 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 hard to come by in the…
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 is no widely accepted definition of “policy documents.” In Overton, we define them broadly. They are documents written primarily for policymakers or by policymakers and published by a policy-focused source. We look beyond policy and legislation. We also track the evidence and thinking that influence them. What is a…
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…
Learn how our advanced search query builder works and which search strategies you can use in Overton Index. Our advanced search query builder guides you to create effective, precise searches. It helps you build complex queries, apply search strategies as they function in Overton Index, and refine your search with…