See how your research impacts policy: Overton policy citations are live on Scopus!

Submitted by Elizabeth Gibson
on Thu, 10/28/2021 - 13:43

Over 7.8 million policy citations have been added to nearly 3 million items in Scopus

Institutional stakeholders, including researchers, librarians, and research leadership are being asked to demonstrate the impact of their research on society. With the addition of policy citation data on Scopus, you can now quickly and easily see where research has been cited in policy documents. Overton, currently the only policy data aggregator, provides Elsevier and Scopus with exclusive access to their data via PlumX Metrics. This new policy citation data source allows Elsevier to have the most policy citation coverage out there.

What can I see in Scopus about the societal impact of my research?

On the Scopus Document Details page, via PlumX Metrics, there are 3 citation metric categories that help demonstrate the societal impact of a piece of research output: Clinical, Patent and Policy citations.  These citations help researchers, institutions and funders demonstrate public engagement with their research. You can view the total policy citations on the Document Details page in Scopus, and click through to the PlumX artifact page to see the actual policy document details. See how this looks on the Scopus Document Details page in this example article and this example. See the underlying policy document details on the PlumX artifact page here.

Background and context: how we got to the best view of policy citation data with Overton

When we first started incorporating policy citations back in 2017, we found that navigating the world of policy documents was very complex.  Policy documents are produced by many different types of organizations such as government agencies, think tanks, NGOs and IGOs.  Policy documents occur in many shapes and forms, as reports, guidelines, recommendations, laws, books, white papers, etc.  Not all policy documents are publicly available.  Getting access to policy documents and then extracting the citation data at scale, was a challenge.

Over the past few years, one company has focused on building the largest collection of policy documents available.  That company is Overton, founded by Euan Adie (former founder of Altmetric).  Overton is collecting policy data from 182 countries and more than 1,500 sources.

We are pleased to now include in PlumX Metrics, over 9 million policy citations to journal articles from Overton, growing our policy citation coverage exponentially!

You can see policy citations from Overton, alongside existing policy citations PlumX has previously curated.  We have de-duplicated these where we had overlap, so no need to worry about double counting.

Learn more