How Are HKUST Articles Cited in Policy Documents?

This week on Research Bridge, we introduce Overton, a useful tool to track and analyze research outputs cited in policy documents.

Tracking Societal Impact with Overton

As funders and researchers increasingly seek to evaluate the diverse impacts of scholarly work, traditional means of measuring research impact, such as citation databases like Web of Science (WOS) and Scopus, often fall short in tracking public engagement and policy impact. New tools such as Overton and Altmetric Explorer provide fresh insights into how research can be tracked and collated by policymakers and through social media.

Overton is a subscription-based service that tracks research outputs cited by policy documents. It stands as one of the largest searchable policy document databases globally, indexing nearly 7.5 million documents from over 29,000 organizations, including governments, intergovernmental organizations (IGOs), and think tanks.

Overton tracks various types of documents, such as government documents, white papers, position statements, policy briefs, and clinical guidelines, and identifies references to scholarly research. It collects documents from over 188 countries in all languages, providing machine-translated titles and descriptions in English.

Cited in 5,500+ Policy Documents

Overton allows users to search for policy citations by “Institution”, “People” or “Scholarly Articles”. For instance, research outputs from HKUST have been cited in 5,531 policy documents across 67 countries since 1995 (Figure 1). Notable citing sources include the Asian Development Bank, Federal Reserve, Government of Hong Kong, OECD, UNESCO, World Bank, World Health Organization, and others.

Figure 1. Policy documents citing HKUST Scholarship. Note: Data was retrieved from Overton on Aug 9, 2023

Less Than 4% Got Cited in Policy

It’s worth highlighting that the 5,500 citations in policy documents stem from a mere 1,986 papers, which accounts for a very small percentage of papers published by HKUST (less than 4%). In Scopus database, there are 51,382 documents since 1995 and HKUST has been consistently publishing over 3,000 papers per year in recent years. Similar result was also recently shared via Overton’s own blog “Three things we’ve learned about policy citations“.

Social Sciences Citations Rule in Policy

We also note that economics and social sciences subjects are more often cited by policymakers over science or technology papers (Table 1). The result is also consistent with a comprehensive analysis of Overton in the article “Overton: A bibliometric database of policy document citation“, which found that unlike traditional bibliometric databases, which lean heavily towards hard sciences, Overton’s citations were predominantly associated with social sciences disciplines.

Table 1. Top 5 journal subjects cited in policy documents

Note: In Overton one article may be assigned to more than one journal subject.

Make Use of Policy Citation Data

Understanding the societal impact of your research is crucial for funding, policy engagement, and demonstrating the real-world relevance of your work. Overton serves as a relatively new data source that connects researchers and research publications to citations and mentions in policy documents.

Here are a few tips to maximize this tool:

1. Use Overton’s search features to monitor policy citations to your research regularly.
2. Identify potential collaborators, stakeholders, and funding opportunities by exploring the policy sources citing research area of your interest.
3. Highlight policy citations in grant applications and reports to showcase your research’s real-world impact.

Overton is now available to all HKUST staff and students. For further information, please contact our Research & Learning Support team or visit the Overton Knowledge Base page.

– By Kevin Ho, Library

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