Overton blog

This week we launched a major upgrade to the reporting functionality within the Overton platform, following feedback from clients.

We've been working on drastic improvements to citation contexts, which are now shown on both the policy and scholarly article search views.

The short answer: yes - everywhere from clinical guidelines to food and drug safety reports to Interpol bulletins.

Predatory publishers are a growing phenomenon in academia and there is concern that their publications are being used in policymaking....

The Covid-19 pandemic saw the global scientific community come together at unprecedented speed to respond to the evolving situation. For policymakers trying to make sense of the flurry of research outputs, it was a daunting prospect.

Open access articles (probably) get cited (a bit) more in scholarly research (see here for a good intro). For the excellent Munin Conference last week we wanted to see if anything similar happens in policy using the Overton policy document database.

A team of researchers from CWTS (the Centre for Science and Technology Studies within the University of Leiden) presented early findings from their analysis of Overton's policy document database at the Altmetric Workshop series 2020.

We're looking forward to being part of a panel discussion on Altmetrics at this year's Bibliometrics and Research Assessment Symposium, organised by the NIH Library.

Where in the UK is academic engagement with policy coming from?

It's been great to see medical scientists embrace medRxiv as the repository of choice for new work on COVID-19. Pre-prints have never really taken off in medicine before but the pandemic has brought with it new ways of publishing and communicating...

The COVID-19 policy dataset is a zip file of policy documents from 2020 relating to the COVID-19 pandemic (the search strategy is documented below). The documents are in PDF format and have an accompanying JSON file explaining their provenance:...