Policy impact analysis enables scholars to examine the impact of their work on legislation, regulations, think tank reports, and other public policy documents. With over 20 million works gathered from over 45,000 organizations, Overton is the largest database of public policy documents available. This guide will demonstrate how to use Overton to find the policy impact of works, authors, and groups, as well as how to use Overton to discover possible publishing venues.
Overton is transparent about its limitations through the use of Data Notes. These notes appear in blue at the top of search results when relevant.
To find the policy impact of a specific research article, use the Search Scholarly Articles tab and enter the title of the work. For this example, we’ll use the following work:
Lusardi, A., & Mitchell, O. S. (2014). The economic importance of financial literacy: Theory and evidence. Journal of Economic Literature, 52(1), 5-44. https://doi.org/10.1257/jel.52.1.5
We can see that this work has been cited by 506 policy documents:
After clicking on the “cited by 506” link, you can explore the filters to understand what kinds of organizations and policy documents have cited this work. We can see that the majority of organizations which have cited this work are think tanks, governments, and intergovernmental organizations.
We could filter this to explore the government citations and use additional filters to see which countries have relied on this research. By clicking on “show more” in the “Source country, state, territory” box, we can see that this particular work of scholarship has influenced governmental policy in over 20 countries, as well as policy in several U.S. states.
You can also use Overton to find the policy impact of other policy documents. Consider this working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research co-authored by Dr. Olivia S. Mitchell: “How Ordinary Consumers Make Complex Economic Decisions: Financial Literacy and Retirement Readiness.”
Search for that document using the Search Policy Documents tab on the Overton homepage.
We can see it has been cited by 74 other policy documents, including by other NBER reports.
We can use Overton’s Search People tab to find all citations and mentions of a specific author. We’ll use Dr. Olivia S. Mitchell, co-author on the 2014 “The economic importance of financial literacy” paper. You can search by name or by ORCID.
Having an up-to-date ORCID profile enhances the discovery of researcher works. For those interested in getting started with ORCID, see our ORCID guide.
If an author has multiple affiliations, like Dr. Mitchell does, select all the relevant affiliations using the checkboxes on the left. Then hover over “Explore” and select “See the policy documents linked to the selected people.”
We can now see over 1,800 policy documents connected to Dr. Mitchell, with the same ability to filter as before. Documents are by default sorted by published date, but you can sort by citations if desired to bring to the top policy works which have been influential within policy.
You can also use the Search People tab to find policy documents connected to a group of authors. This is especially useful when looking for the impact of a department, research center, or lab. Here, we’ll look at the standing faculty in Wharton’s Business Economics and Public Policy Department. Click on “Enter list of names”, then enter each name or ORCID associated with a researcher on a separate line, then select “Search for names” at the bottom of the list.
In the results, you can either accept the entire list of suggested matches or up to 25 of the authors on any one page of results. Authors with common names may have multiple pages of results, many of which are irrelevant. Accurately checking off those names across multiple pages is not possible. ORCID ID lists are a more controlled way of being confident in the authors included. If a person has a name shared by more than one entity, you may wish to use their ORCID instead in your search.
To see policy documents citing or mentioning the authors in your full set, hover over “Explore” and select “See the policy documents linked to these [#] people.”
This department has influenced over 5,000 works of policy. Again, use filters to explore deeper. For example, we can limit the policy documents by topic to Economic Inequality: 584 works.
Scholars looking to make an impact with their research consider numerous factors. They may explore open access options to increase the reach of their work. They may weigh journal impact factor to explore how influential a journal is in their field, or examine the journal’s scope statement to see if the publishing venue accepts works with a given research methodology or topic. For authors looking to make an impact on public policy, it may be of interest to see how often a given journal is cited by policy documents.
For this exercise, we can start with the Search Policy Documents tab. We want to filter through all the policy documents, so click Search Policy without entering anything into the search box.
If an author is interested in publishing about housing insecurity, we can explore the relevant Topics for housing by clicking on “See all values” in the Topics filter on the left. You can then search through the potential topics and check off the ones of interest, then select “Apply Filter.”
In our new subset of policy documents, scroll down to the “Cites journal” filter and click “Show More.”
In descending order, we can now see which journals are highly cited by housing policymakers. This may help to inform authors seeking to publish research on this topic if real-world policy impact is important to them.
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