Global Think Tanks

From the largest in Australia to the smallest in Zimbabwe, every year IGOs, NGOs, nonprofits, and think tanks around the world publish tens of thousands of items on their websites.

Ignored by traditional discovery search engines, Global Think Tanks finds and preserves this valuable, front-line, content from every continent, including voices from the Global South, hard-to-find community organizations, and content recovered from groups that no longer exist.

Topical, current, comprehensive 

The largest ever collection of grey literature from think tanks, IGOs, NGOs, foundations, and research centers working right across the policy and social science spectrum. Coverage includes all major intergovernmental organisations and well-known think tanks, alongside smaller and regional organisations routinely missed by conventional search engines — including voices from the Global South and content from groups that no longer exist.

Unlike conventional databases, Global Think Tanks does not index books and journals. Instead, it brings together hard-to-find reports, working papers, briefings, data sets, case studies, blog posts, and more — published by organisations of all sizes, from every continent.

Evidence from the real world

Third sector organisations work closely with the communities they serve, earning trust and gathering insights that traditional channels often miss. Their output is timely, practice-based, and grounded in real-world issues — making it an essential component in research, teaching and systematic reviews.

In an era of political volatility, disinformation, and rapid policy change, access to a broad and diverse range of policy perspectives has never been more important. Global Think Tanks captures that breadth — including content from organisations that no longer exist and material no longer available on its original publishing site — ensuring that a wide range of voices remains part of the scholarly record.

Findable, citable, stable

Grey literature is notoriously difficult to manage: websites go down, links break, and lacking consistent metadata or persistent identifiers, it can be hard to cite reliably or integrate into research workflows.

Global Think Tanks creates standard metadata and assigns a persistent identifier to every item, making it straightforward to cite and use. And if the original document disappears, in most cases we can provide a copy.

"Discoverability of critical NGO reports is a game changer …[this] shifts evidence and knowledge production towards equitable access!” - —Harsha Dayal, Dir. of Research Management, Government of South Africa