Publications such as the justifications of new legislation, public reports and guidelines by authorities and administration, reviews supplied to administrative bodies by companies, strategy papers and pamphlets of non-governmental organisations and think-tanks often contain citations to research results. These citations would be one clearly identifiable type of societal impact of research. However, this ‘grey literature’ has just been left out of indexing and even library collections, so it has been difficult to assemble data on how research publications are cited in these policy documents.
At least one new service has emerged to bridge this gap, Overton. It collects and indexes citations, keywords, concepts and people from policy publications (such as publications by the Prime Minister's Office, Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare and Finnish Current Care Guidelines)
The database requires a paid subscription. In Finland, it is in use in several universities. At the University of Jyväskylä, it has been used to, for example, showcase the societal impact metrics of faculties and researchers at https://oscsolutions.cc.jyu.fi/policyimpact/.
Sources
Overton (no date) [online] https://www.overton.io/ [Accessed 13.4.2022]
University of Jyväskylä Open Science Centre (no date) Policy Impact Metrics. https://oscsolutions.cc.jyu.fi/policyimpact/ [Accessed 13.4.2022]