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About Overton

Euan
By Euan
• 9 articles

Accessibility statement

*How accessible is the Overton web application, and what is the level of conformance to WCAG 2.1, and do you have a VPAT report * This accessibility statement applies to the Overton web application at https://app.overton.io It is designed to be used by as many people as possible. The text should be clear and simple to understand, though it is a specialist tool and assumes knowledge of some acronyms and academic terms. You should be able to: - Zoom in up to 200% without problems - Navigate all of the web application using just a keyboard - Navigate most of the web application using speech recognition software AbilityNet has advice on making your device easier to use if you have a disability. Compliance status and what we’re doing to improve accessibility The Overton web application is WCAG 2.1 compliant with level A conformance. We’re currently working to improve this to level AA, with specific improvements to colour contrasts and font sizing. For more detail see our VPAT report below. 2025 Overton VPATDownload Feedback and contact information If you need information on this website in a different format like accessible PDF, large print, easy read, audio recording, please email [email protected]. We’ll consider your request and get back to you as soon as we can. Reporting accessibility problems with this website We’re always looking to improve the accessibility of this website. If you find any problems not listed on this page or think we’re not meeting accessibility requirements, please email [email protected] Enforcement procedure If you’re not happy with how we respond to your complaint you can contact the Equality Advisory and Support Service (EASS). Preparation of this accessibility statement This statement was prepared on 9th October 2021. It was last reviewed on 26th February 2026.

Last updated on Jun 25, 2026

Release notes for 2021

How the system evolved in 2021 This page lists the important data updates, fixes and new features that we added to Overton over the course of 2021. An easy way to keep up to date is to sign up for our newsletter, which will highlight any major changes to the app or data. We deploy changes to Overton daily: there isn’t a fixed release cycle and typically new features are released as soon as they are tested and pass QA. If you’ve got any questions about any of the items below please reach out to support or your account manager and they’ll be happy to help. Updates in 2021 Week of 6th December 2021 - You can now filter by “published after” and “publisher before” dates. - We changed the way we handle invalid dates in the system. This happens when we’re either unable to find the publication date for a policy document or it looks invalid. Previously these documents were given a placeholder date of Jan 1st 1970 (“0” in Unix time) which was confusing for users, now instead you’ll see “unknown date”. Documents with an unknown publication date still appear in search results but aren’t included in the “published by year” filter or publications by year graph in the report view. Find out more. - We fixed a bug in the people mention finding algorithm where it wasn’t finding matches where the first name and last name were separated by a newline - Fixed a bug in the people mention finding algorithm to do with last names containing a hyphen Week of 29th November 2021 - You can now filter by “added after” and “added before” dates. These work on the date that each policy document was added to Overton (not their publication dates!) and are mainly useful to list all the new documents since a given date or when you want to reproduce a search you’ve run on a specific date previously. Week of 22nd November 2021 - Excel exports of search results now include the lines of text that matched any free text search queries. Find out more. Week of 15th November 2021 - We’ve started moving away from Microsoft Academic as a source of affiliation data and replacing it with a mix of data from OpenAlex, CrossRef, journal publishers and PubMed. - We have started a monthly newsletter which contains recent product updates and user guides. You can sign up here. Week of 25th October 2021 - You can now export topics from the Topics view to CSV. As a reminder we extract topics from policy, and mark the ones that are appearing unusually frequently in any given set of documents. Find out more. Week of 18th October 2021 - You can now search for ISBNs, PubMed IDs and PubMed Central IDs as well as DOIs. The same list can include a mix of different identifier types. Find out more. - After pasting in a list of identifiers Overton will give you a quick heads up about how many were matched and how to interpret that number. - Administrators can now set some “example searches” that all of the users in their organization see on their start page. Find out more. Week of 11th October 2021 - Improved the speed and reliability of full text searching by adding more servers, allowing more complex queries to run quickly. - We improved book support by making sure we collect ISBNs for any items we see that also have a DOI. - Allowed searching for names in LASTNAME, FIRSTNAME format Week of 27th September 2021 - We’ve made it easier to search for links to specific websites in the database in two ways: - domains will now match in full text search. You need to search for a full domain name (including the “.com” part…), but any subdomains will be matched automatically e.g. a search for senate.gov will match foreign.senate.gov, *www.senate.gov *and so on. - a new “domain:” field specific search allows you to search any part of linked domains, e.g. domain:gov or domain:senate - Added EUR-Lex, legislation and case law from across the EU Week of 13th September 2021 - We’ve improved how you control and customise email alerts for your saved searches. After saving a policy document search to your dashboard using the “Export” dropdown menu you’ll see an “Email alerts” button next to it on the dashboard screen. Click on this button to control how often the search results are emailed to you – weekly or monthly. Find out more. Week of 6th September 2021 - You can now save topic maps (you can find these in the “Explore” button when looking at policy document searches) to your dashboard as saved searches - Fixed duplicate document issues with several policy sources Week of 9th August 2021 - Added VIVO connector to pull in customer publication lists and departmental affiliations – this requires some custom work to set-up and maintain, just let us know if you’d like more information Week of 2nd August 2021 - Overhauled scraping logic for larger policy sources (especially at the national and state levels), which means that they will be refreshed more frequently Week of 19th July 2021 - Drastically improved search speed, especially for queries where fulltext search is not required - Improved design & layout of reports when printed, avoiding page breaks in the middle of tables where possible Week of 12th July 2021 - We’ve added some brand new off the shelf reporting functionality for both the policy and scholarly article views. It works on any query in those views and you can reach it by using the “See report” button in the toolbar just above the results. Find out more. - Simplified layout of the toolbar and search results views. Commands are now grouped into “Export” “Explore” and “See report” Week of 3rd July 2021 - We now collect and index MeSH terms, so you can see which articles you’ve authored or funded with a given term and where it has been cited in policy. - We’ve also added article types from PubMed, so you can e.g. look at just systematic reviews, or ignore editorials - We now show the first line of abstracts in the scholarly articles view where that data is available in PubMed Week of 28th June 2021 - Fixed issues with gov.ie now that they’ve completed their website redesign Week of 21st June 2021 - Extensive fixes to congressional data sources, thanks v much to Kellogg researchers Week of 14th June 2021 - Drastic improvements to citation contexts, which are now shown on both the policy and scholarly article search views. Overton always shows what text where a citation was identified – typically in bibliography sections – but now also tries to determine where that citation was actually used in the policy document body. Find out more. Week of 7th June 2021 - Improved FundRef support. You can search for policy documents citing articles funded by a given FundRef funder, or see the scholarly articles themselves. FundRef coverage is still limited to recent years and a subset of funders but is constantly improving.

Last updated on Jun 25, 2026

Release notes for 2022

How the system evolved in 2022 Please note: this is an older page, you can find the current set of release notes here This page lists the important data updates, fixes and new features that we added to Overton over the course of 2022. An easy way to keep up to date is to sign up for our newsletter, which will highlight any major changes to the app or data. We deploy changes to Overton daily: there isn’t a fixed release cycle and typically new features are released as soon as they are tested and pass QA. If you’ve got any questions about any of the items below please reach out to support or your account manager and they’ll be happy to help. Updates in 2022 Week of 10th October 2022 Data notes appearing at the top of some search results - After some internal testing we’ve rolled out a first pass at “data notes“. These are cards that appear at the bottom of some search results (and occasionally at the top) that highlight when you might need to consider a limitation or potential bias in the data that you’re currently looking at. Week of 3rd October 2022 - We’ve made user dashboards (where you see your saved searches) load significantly faster. Week of 26th September 2022 - Fixed an issue that meant people weren’t always receiving their email alerts correctly. Week of 1st August 2022 - We’ve made a number of small changes that significantly speed up the loading times of search results on the site. - We made some large scale changes behind the scenes to the way that facets work (the filters in the left hand sidebars when you’re looking at policy documents or articles). You can now see far more at once. Week of 18th July 2022 - We rolled out two features related to policy documents citing other policy documents. - The first is a new “See policy documents these policy documents cite” option in the Explore menu on the documents tab. You can use this to get a complete list of other policy documents being cited by any given set of policy documents in Overton. - The second allows you to see all of the cited policy documents when you’re on a single document page – we already let you see all of the cited scholarly document outputs so this just allows you to do the same for any policy matches. Week of 4th July 2022 - We’ve started listing individual PDFs on the left hand side of document pages (in Overton a single policy document can be made up of multiple HTML pages or PDFs), showing size, language and number of pages. Week of 20th June 2022 - The People tab has previously only shown statistics about policy documents next to each person, but we’re now also showing the number of matching scholarly outputs. This is important as you might have two people with ten policy citations, but one might have gotten them from a single scholarly paper vs the other who got them from a handful of papers cited by policymakers. - You can also now click on the scholarly output stat to see the ones that have been cited in policy. Week of 16th May 2022 - We’ve added a new filter to the articles tab allow you to see all papers with authors in a specific country – so you can now view e.g. all research outputs with an Irish author cited at least once in policy from the EU. Week of 25th April 2022 - We added the citation context snippets (showing where an item is cited in policy) to the data snapshots. This data isn’t new – it has been in the application itself for a while but we’re now confident we can take the “beta” label off it. Week of 11th April 2022 - We speeded up how Overton deals with very large documents and documents that cite a very large number of scholarly papers – the IPCC climate change reports fall into this category. Previously if one was in your search results it would add seconds to the page load time – this is now fixed! Week of 4th April 2022 - You can now hover over a policy source name in the “View all of Overton’s policy sources” page to get more information on that source, just as you can in the search results view. New policy source information popup on the “View all of Overton’s policy sources” page - Also on the policy sources view – we’ve added a “Remove all” button to the page when you’re viewing your key sources, to speed up the process of deleting all default key sources and then re-adding the ones that are relevant to you. Week of 14th March 2022 - You can now share reports with people outside of your organization, or colleagues who don’t have a seat license for Overton. This is a quick, easy way to share top level information about policy engagement with a broader audience. Just click on the “See report” button on the policy or articles view to load the report, then pick “Share this report” from the export menu. You’ll be given a link that you can redistribute by email, in team chat or however else is convenient. - Anybody clicking on the link will be able to see the same report page, but if they click through to see more detail they’ll be prompted to sign in or create an account. New “Share this report” option on report pages - We made a handful of small improvements to the API output – mostly bug fixes but also added a next page field (containing the link to the next page of results for that query) and added previously missing fields like policy source subtype and organisational authors Week of 7th March 2022 - We did a bit more work on detecting and removing self citations. This could happen when a policy document itself has a DOI that it then mentions (on the front page, for example) – Overton would pick that up and treat it as a scholarly citation. - Fixed a bug that meant the “added before / after” and “published before / after” filters couldn’t be used simultaneously. You can now do this. Week of 7th February 2022 - Added a new filter to the Articles tab that allows you to see outputs with authors in a given country (we derive this information from the author’s affiliation and GRiD / RoR – so we can tell for example that somebody at the University of Toronto is in Canada, at the University of Edinburgh is in the UK etc.) The new “has author in country” filter Week of 17th January 2022 - We’ve made rights & permissions for some sources more explicit by adding a new text snippet in search results: Example search result with new rights & permissions field displayed - Clicking on this rights & permissions link brings you to the document details page where more information is displayed. - We improved the way we split blocks of text that contain multiple references (e.g. “See x; also y and z”), which increased the number of unique articles in the database by ~ 2%. Week of 10th January 2022 - We improved the way policy source exports to Excel work, by adding the title variants of each source, the date added and ensuring that we only export the currently selected set of sources - We made name searching in the People tab much faster, and fixed a bug seen when names contained a mix of initials and nobiliary particles - We made the DOI search box much more forgiving: at a pinch it will try to extract DOIs from journal article URLs and other strings…. but this is risky! Try to use clean DOIs (either just the part from 10.xxx onwards or the doi.org link) wherever possible Week of 3rd January 2022 - You can now search the articles tab by ORCID (which are unique identifiers for academic researchers) – just drop them into the identifiers search box like you would a DOI or a PubMed ID. To match outputs from more than one person just paste in more than one ORCID Example of searching the Articles tab by ORCID - We now show the currently selected value in filters on the left hand side Filter boxes showing currently selected values

Last updated on Jun 25, 2026

Release notes for 2023

A list of recent data updates, fixes and new product functionality We update this page regularly with details of the important data updates, fixes and new features added to Overton. An easy way to keep up to date is to sign up for our newsletter, which will highlight any major changes to the app or data. We deploy changes to Overton daily: there isn’t a fixed release cycle and typically new features are released as soon as they are tested and pass QA. This page lists the work we’ve done in 2023: there are other pages for previous years. If you’ve got any questions about any of the items below please reach out to support or your account manager and they’ll be happy to help. Recent updates August 2023 - Overton has launched a new SDG classifier which enables our users to get some understanding on how policy documents can be linked to SDGs. This functionality is still in *beta *and we’re still experimenting with ways to improve precision and recall. More detailed information can be found here. July 2023 - Users now have the option to select multiple items when using Overton’s filters. June 2023 - Users are now able to configure and receive email alerts for search queries in the ‘Scholarly Articles Cited in Policy’ search. - Users are now able to tag/bookmark article results in the ‘Scholarly Articles Cited in Policy’ search. May 2023 - We have added the ability for users to bulk export (up to 1K) policy document and scholarly articles results in RIS format. - Users can now send CSV exports of policy documents or scholarly articles to an email of choice. April 2023 - We have added a new facet in “Search Scholarly Articles” search for “Open Access Status”. Users can now see the different Open Access types for scholarly article results. The underlying OA status information comes from OpenAlex. March 2023 - We have added a new index for tracked funders of research cited in policy. The index of research funders can be accessed by navigating to ‘Browse’ in the platform. - We’ve added the cited_by document “topics” to the articles API output - We’ve added each person’s “top subject” to the people page’s API endpoint February 2023 - We’ve added a new “language” column to policy document exports, allowing you to see which languages they are written in. - We fixed a bug that resulting in incorrect policy citation counts that occurred when an “invalid” document (a document without a title or date) contained citations. These are now ignored until the invalid document is fixed. - We did two pieces of work around “highlights” – the parts of the app that show you where or why your query matched a result. - We added it to the API output, previously it was only visible in the Overton web app - We added some user specific flags to return more than just one sentence on either side of the match for full text queries. More the one sentence gives you a bit more context for the match and is useful for e.g. text mining use cases. January 2023 - We fixed the Government of Canada “2002 bulge”: a lot of documents from this source had 2002 as a date as this was when the new gov.ca document repository launched (we think) leading to incorrect publication dates in their metadata. - We added Gulf States, Arab League and Middle East as geographic regions in the app, so you can quickly see policy just from these countries. - We’ve added support for “home” journals, publishers, funders and policy sources. If you have a home organization set it is pinned to the top of the relevant facet in the sidebar making it easier to find relevant documents.

Last updated on Jun 25, 2026

Release notes for 2024

A list of recent data updates, fixes and new product functionality We update this page regularly with details of the important data updates, fixes and new features added to Overton. An easy way to keep up to date is to sign up for our newsletter, which will highlight any major changes to the app or data. We deploy changes to Overton daily. There isn’t a fixed release cycle and typically new features are released as soon as they are tested and pass QA. This page lists the work we’ve done in 2024. There are other pages for previous years. If you’ve got any questions about any of the items below please reach out to support or your account manager. November 2024 - Policy documents now have ‘Document Descriptions’ generated using AI to summarise the document and its key themes. For more information about the process, please see ‘How does Overton generate document descriptions?’ July 2024 - Users can now add a custom title for any reports they generate - Users now have the option to save summary reports to PDF June 2024 - When reviewing documents from Overton’s policy documents tab, users can now filter results by language using the document language filter April 2024 - Excel exports now include - a front page that includes details of the search query including the date the query was conducted, what filters were used and the search URL - data notes on a final slide March 2024 - When selecting policy sources from the Policy Documents tab, you can now add a selection of sources to your key sources - We have added an ‘exact phrase’ autocomplete option for any searches containing more than 2 words January 2024 - The translated title for policy documents is now included in the Excel export - We have added ORCIDs to article CSV exports - We have now added data notes in a separate sheet to all excel exports - We are adding EU27 and APAC to our regions lists - We now show 50 results per page as default rather than the original 20 results - We’ve updated name searches to account for apostrophes in names making it easier for users who do have them in their names - We now show all highlights from a policy search when multiselect is being used. So if you select multiple universities on the policy tab you will now see papers from either / both universities underneath the search results.

Last updated on Jun 25, 2026

Release notes for 2025

*Recent updates to Overton Index including data updates, fixes and new product functionality * We make updates to the Overton Index daily and share these as release notes. We don’t follow a fixed release cycle—new features go live as soon as they pass testing and QA. This page tracks all work completed in 2025. You can find updates from previous years on separate pages. To stay informed, you can also sign up for our newsletter, which highlights major updates to the app and data. If you have questions about any of the items listed below, please contact Support. November 2025 We had two major updates in November - We launched the new Engage Researcher Opportunity Matcher, which automatically matches researchers with an Engage subscription to the most relevant policy engagement opportunities on the platform. - We completed a major update to the Overton start pages including a new Advanced Search Query Builder enabling users to build complex search queries to take full advantage of Overton’s search capabilities without being an expert in boolean searches. October 2025 - We made our Document Descriptions available on the Excel Export to help users looking to complete systematic and literature reviews analyse the relevance of documents more efficiently. - We launched the new and improved Data Index pages, where you can browse all the sources Overton tracks, including policy sources, journals, publishers and funders. The redesigned interface offers faster performance, better accessibility, improved search capabilities and streamlined workflows which allow you to find source details faster and more intuitively. July 2025 - We rolled out the COFOG classification system for our policy documents. COFOG is a system that classifies the broad objectives of government. We assign every policy document to at least one COFOG division. You can find more information here https://help.overton.io/article/about-topics-entities-and-subject-areas/ - We’ve added tooltips to all filters in the Policy Documents search to help users better understand their functionality. Where available, tooltips also include links to relevant help pages for additional guidance. - Opportunities admins with premium Engage subscriptions can now combine people searches with best match scoring filters to identify the strongest matches for specific researchers. - We fixed a bug that caused minor formatting issues in Excel exports. - We’ve made it easier to access all help resources from within the app. Users can now navigate directly from the header bar to help pages, case studies, and how-to guides. - Users can now include page numbers for where a citation is found in API exports from the Scholarly Articles tab. June 2025 - Users can now use a ‘select-all’ option on all of the filters available within Overton Index. This will allow users to easily exclude options from their searches. May 2025 - We launched a similar search option for the Overton Index, allowing users to find related documents within our database. You can find more information here https://help.overton.io/article/searching-for-similar-policy-documents/ March 2025 - We launched our improved SDG classifier. You can find more information here https://help.overton.io/article/about-the-sdg-categories-in-overton/ February 2025 - We launched our new three-tiered source type taxonomy. You can find more information here https://help.overton.io/article/how-does-overton-index-classify-its-sources/ - We fixed a bug that was causing errors when trying to export results to Powerpoint. January 2025 - Subscribers can now use OpenAthens SSO without releasing their email address attributes to us. - We’ve updated the PowerPoint exports to include information on how many times an article has been cited by other policy documents, if relevant to the user’s search. - Users with API functionality enabled on their account can now view their API keys on their account settings page.

Last updated on Jun 25, 2026