Overton blog

Overton has launched a micro-grant to fund academic research into policy. Here Overton’s founder Euan Adie explains our motivation and rationale for supporting researchers in this field. 

Rivers are essential for sustaining ecosystems, providing freshwater resources, supporting agriculture, facilitating transportation and offering recreational opportunities. Humans are heavily reliant on rivers, but also subject to how they respond...

We’re excited to announce that our latest project, the Areas of Research Interest (ARI) database has just gone live! This database lets researchers and civil servants search, browse or analyse research questions from government.

We spend a lot of time at Overton collecting the evidence that governments around the world are using to make decisions, and we’ve been learning a lot about policy engagement as a result.

We wanted to find out what the think tank landscape looked like around the world. So, in this series we’ll use the Overton data to understand how think tanks are influencing policy, one country at a time.

Edit on 16th August: we realised that our initial figures didn't take into account self citations (documents citing documents from the same think tank) and have corrected the table. The ranking of think tanks in the top 10 has changed.

We wanted to...

Citing research-based evidence in policymaking more often is a no-brainer. After all, it stands to reason that making and delivering decisions that affect the public should be well reasoned using the latest objective information available. However,...

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...

We love seeing how our clients use Overton's data in unique and interesting ways. So we were really pleased to hear from Janne Seppänen at the University of Jyväskylä's Open Science Centre, about how they've been experimenting with presenting...

Overton's database of policy document is extensive – at the time of writing, we have 6,069,397 policy documents from 30,644 policy organizations – and we're adding more all the time. On top of making their full text searchable we categorize and...