Overton offers the world’s largest collection of free policy documents, parliamentary transcripts, government guidance, and think tank research. It helps researchers explore policy documentation and check for citations of their work, demonstrating research impact. This evidence is valuable for grant applications, promotions, job applications, and for academics with research published outside traditional journals.
You access Overton through the library catalogue or by going to overton.io and clicking on "sign in" in the top right hand corner.
The University has a subscription to Overton, providing you with full access to its resources. If you are on campus, Overton will automatically grant access via Institutional Access. Additionally, you have the option to set up a personal account. We recommend creating a personal account as it allows you to save searches, set up email alerts, and log in to Overton when working off campus. If you do not wish to set up a personal account and would still like to access Overton off campus, please use the library catalogue link.
You can explore if your research has been cited in policy in three ways:
Search by Scholarly Article: Click on the ‘Search Scholarly Articles’ tab and enter the title, keywords, DOI, ISBN, or PMID of your output. Overton will list relevant outputs found in policy. Click ‘Explore’ and choose “See the policy citing these papers” to view the citing policy documents.
Search by Name: Click on the “Search People” tab and enter your name. Use the ‘Enter List of Names’ button for name variations. Click on your name in the search results to see the citing policy documents. If multiple relevant names appear, select them and choose “See the relevant policy documents linked to the selected people.”
Search by Group of Documents: Click on the ‘Search Scholarly Articles’ tab and select “Search by DOI, ORCID, PMID, or ISBN” Enter your ORCID number to search for all documents in your ORCID profile, or add a list of unique identifiers for your documents. This can be useful for assessing the impact of a research group or department. After getting your search results, click ‘Explore’ and choose ‘See the policy citing these papers.’
More information about searching for citations for a person can be found here.
Overton team have created a very useful set of videos demonstrating how you can use Overton.
The Library Research Analytics team can help you make the use of Overton. We can help
Please contact us via research-analytics@bath.ac.uk.