Comparing coverage of policy citations to scientific publications in Overton and Altmetric.com

Abstract

Implementation of academic publications in policy documents is considered as evidence of cultural and societal impact of science. This research compared the policy coverage of 18,996 Scopus publications authored by researchers affiliated to 18 Finnish universities and institutes in eight Social Science fields. Two sources of policy citations, namely Overton and Altmetric.com, are checked and compared for coverage and overlap. The overall results suggest that on average about 39% of publications were cited in Overton and 9% in Altmetric.com. There was on average about 5% overall overlap in the coverage of documents between the two sources. The proportion of unique policy citations in Overton (19%) were significantly higher than in Altmetric.com (0,6%). Finnish universities can get a more reliable report on the extent their publications have been cited by policy documents through combining the results from Overton and Altmetric.com. However, they can trust Overton for significantly better coverage of national Finnish and Swedish language policy documents.