Research metrics

Overton is a database of policy documents and the research papers which they cite. It covers around sixteen million policy documents (plus working papers, official reports, etc) and six million academic papers as sources.

It can be used either as a discovery tool for policy material - it has full-text searching and indexing of policy documents - or as a citation database to try and trace the wider impact of research.

It also offers a database of policy engagement opportunities, for researchers seeking to engage more with policy consultations.

You can access the Overton dashboard directly without needing to log in, though you may need to authenticate as a UCL user.

It is also possible to register an account to save searches, set email alerts, tags and bookmarks and set up key sources lists.

Overton does not currently support filtering for UCL outputs based on our internal data. However, it is still possible to generate this data if needed.

We recommend that if you want to look for policy documents citing research from a specific UCL unit, that you produce a list of papers using the InCites MyOrganisation data, export this from InCites, and then extract the DOIs. These can then be pasted into the "search by DOI..." field in Overton, shown below.

Overton will then produce a search results list covering all the matching papers in its database. Note that this is likely to be a smaller number than the output from InCites as not all papers are indexed in Overton.

We are currently waiting for some training videos for Overton to be produced by the vendor - these will be added as soon as possible. If you would like a walk-through, please contact bibliometrics@ucl.ac.uk to arrange a session.