Learn more about which sources we track and explore the extent of our international coverage.
Overview
In our efforts to build a global policy database, we’ve brought together policy documents from sources in 193 countries and territories and authored in 74 different languages.
Logged-in users can view a breakdown of policy documents by country directly in the app through the summary report. They can also explore our ‘Sources’ index to see the number of policy sources available by country or region.
While our coverage is broad, the volume of documents varies by location, with some countries contributing only a limited number of records. This is due to the availability of policy documents online in some regions.
A closer look at our coverage
As of August 2025, ~62% of the documents in Overton are from sources in the US, UK, Japan, Canada, Germany, or France.
A further 13% of documents are from international organisations (IGO’s like the United Nations, OECD or the World Bank).
There are a few reasons for this:
- Think tanks and NGOs are heavily concentrated in London, Washington D.C, New York and Brussels. Around 6% of the documents in Overton are from these kinds of sources.
- Governments are online to different degrees. Some governments don’t have the infrastructure needed to make documents available online or have other priorities.
- Many users look for local policy impact. In the UK, North America, New Zealand, Australia and parts of Europe we collect data at a state level for this reason. For other countries we focus on collecting documents at national government level.
- Local knowledge – sometimes we miss an important policy source because we’re not familiar with the way systems work in a particular country. If you think we’re missing something, please let us know.