Overton for librarians
and resource managers

Support research excellence and impact within your institution

Overton is the world’s largest searchable policy database. We collect millions of policy documents and link them to the research, people and other policy documents that they quote or reference. 

We help institutions to understand and influence real world policymaking. From impact managers to researchers, communications officers to students, our platform supports users across the whole organisation to meet their professional and academic goals.

And with site license for the Overton platform, campus-wide access is both simple to administer and cost-effective for those managing institutional resources.

Help your institution understand its reach and impact in the policy space

Support academics in keeping their CRIS profile updated with policy mentions

Make sure academic staff and students have access to policy documents to support their research

What do you get?

  • Access to over 9.3M full text policy documents and guidelines from 32,000 organisations in 188 countries
  • Our powerful web interface which allows you to search full text, track specific DOIs, PMIDs & ISBNs or individual researchers and to get an overview of your institution’s policy activity
  • Friendly, responsive support from a team who are passionate about evidence-informed policy and the researchers driving it
  • Summary reports, Powerpoint slides and email alerts to stay on top of and quickly report on new policy that references your work
  • CSV exports, RSS feeds and API access to quickly bring the data into your own systems
  • The ability to request new sources of data to be tracked: we commit to quickly add up to 7 sources within 7 days for you each year
  • Site licence for institutional subscriptions

How Overton is used across the institution

For research managers

  • See where the research from your university is being cited in policy
  • Find and evidence case studies, and gain a better understanding of your institution’s pathways to impact 
  • Find influential organisations to engage with
  • Get alerts to stay on top of new policy mentions

For researchers and students

  • Discover policy documents from around the world and manage them in one place
  • Understand the routes from research into policy using data
  • Monitor the quality of government policymaking and the influence of think tanks and NGOs
  • See which organisations are producing policy documents on a given subject

For policy units and communications teams

  • Track the policy mentions of your institution’s research on an ongoing basis
  • Spot emerging policy debates that your university could shape
  • Engage with organisations that are influencing real world policy to promote your institution’s research
  • See which of your researchers are best placed to engage with journalists and policymakers

Why Overton? 

We’re the world’s largest searchable policy database, typically returning 3x more data than similar products – we’re especially strong in the social sciences and clinical and translational medicine.

We track everything from white papers to think tank policy briefs to national clinical guidelines, and automatically find the references to your scholarly research, academics and other outputs. We look for the names of any researchers on expert panels, who are quoted in policy documents, who give evidence to committee hearings and more.

Importantly we also find the links between policy documents – often research is picked up by intermediaries like think tanks and agencies – giving you unparalleled insight into how your institution is engaging with policymakers.

Our clients include

Plus several institutional clients across Asia Pacific, North America and Europe

Request a free trial

We offer a fully featured 30 day trial of Overton so that you can explore the data for yourself and see what's possible. Fill in the form below and we'll get you set up.

Have questions? We’re happy to help!​

Overton is the world’s largest searchable index of policy documents, guidelines, think tank publications and working papers.

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