Overton Blog
New guide alert: Enhance your impact tracking with Overton Index!
Unlock the full potential of the Overton Index with our new resource!
We are thrilled to announce our latest comprehensive guide designed to help you fully leverage the Overton Index. This resource is your ultimate tool to enhance your impact tracking capabilities and gain a complete understanding of your research influence on policy.
Whether your goal is to create detailed impact reports, elevate your professional profile or simply understand the policy landscape better, this guide offers step-by-step instructions on how to uncover as much evidence of influence as possible. Read on for a sneak peek of what you can learn!
What can you learn?
Research and researchers shape decision-making through various channels. The Overton Index is designed to help you uncover all these pathways, revealing the diverse ways scholarly ideas influence policy so you can discover the true extent of your influence. Here’s a sneak peek of what's inside the guide:
1. Tracking policy citations and mentions
Direct citations are straightforward, but did you know that we index the full text of all policy documents we collect? This feature allows us to detect where individuals and institutions are mentioned, highlighting the broader influence of your research even when specific papers aren't cited.
2. Unpicking citation pathways
It’s uncommon for scholarly papers to be directly referenced in government policy. More often, research is 'translated' and repackaged by intermediaries like think tanks, creating a complex attribution chain. Our guide shows you how to link your scholarly ideas to real-world decision-making via policy-policy citations.
3. Evaluating your findings
Our guide includes general rules of thumb to ensure you draw meaningful conclusions, no matter how or why you're using Overton Index to track policy impact.
Stand out in a competitive landscape
Whether you're an academic, program manager, policy analyst, or research manager, this guide will enhance your ability to uncover the real-world impact of your work and provide compelling evidence of your contributions to knowledge production.
We look forward to seeing how you use this new guide to ensure your contributions are recognised. Let us know how you get on!
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What is Overton
Overton connects research with public policy. Our suite of products helps you find, evidence and grow the real-world impact of your work.
Our flagship product Overton Index is the world’s largest policy and grey literature database. You can discover over 15 million policy documents, linked to all the evidence it references - use as a grey literature searching tool or a way to track and evidence the reach and influence of research.
Our new tool Overton Engage contains policy engagement opportunities from all over the world, brought together in a single searchable interface - it offers a direct way to access policymakers and affect real world change.
Get a global view of the policy with the tools to study it in depth.