Overton for researchers

Understand the pathways to policy impact

Overton collects millions of policy documents and links them to the research, people and other policy documents that they quote or reference. Overton is used by researchers to study the dynamics of real world policymaking and also to track the impact of their own work on policy.

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

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 the dynamics of policymaking.

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 policy activity by author, institution, country and more
  • 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 published that meets your saved search criteria
  • 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

Our clients include

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.

Start your free trial

Follow us on social media

We’re proud to be accredited with the Good Business Charter. The GBC aims to encourage responsible business behaviour in the UK by assessing companies against ten criteria, including the real living wage, diversity and inclusion, environmental responsibility and more.

Find out more about the accreditation.

Copyright Overton.io 2022 All rights reserved