Overton Blog

Bridging the Policy Gap: A Finnish Case Study presented at NWB2022

On 20th September 2022, we travelled to Turku, Finland for the annual Nordic Workshop on Bibliometrics and Research Policy conference, to meet colleagues from across the sector and present a short lightning talk and poster. Our presentation focussed on how alternative indicators could be used to track the research-policy interface in the Nordic region, focussing specifically on Finland. 

Acknowledging that academic-policy engagement is not always centred around traditional outputs and therefore often can’t be captured by traditional bibliometric indicators, Overton looks for alternative data points such as mentions of researchers in free text, finding expert panel memberships, witness statements to parliaments, acknowledgments and more. This enhances visibility of a broader range of engagement routes not captured with just citations.

For our poster presentation,  we ran a report for research which had been produced by Finnish research institutes between the years of 2015 and 2021, of which (at the time the poster was created, 11,003). These articles had been cited by outputs from policy organisations in 86 countries. From these articles, we then used Overton’s automatic reporting feature to identify: 

  • Which policy sources cite Finnish research most frequently
  • Which Finnish institutions are cited by policy organisations most frequently
  • Where (geographically) Finnish research is most commonly cited
  • Which funders are most commonly associated with research which then goes on to be cited by a policy organisation

You can see what we found below!

You can download the poster here to view in a larger format

We really enjoyed presenting our poster and participating in a range of conversations from our wonderful colleagues from across the sector! If you have any questions or have an idea on how you might like to work with us, please do get in touch with us by email on support@overton.io!

What is Overton

We help universities, think tanks and publishers understand the reach and influence of their research.

The Overton platform contains is the world’s largest searchable policy database, with almost 5 million documents from 29k organisations.

We track everything from white papers to think tank policy briefs to national clinical guidelines, and automatically find the references to scholarly research, academics and other outputs.