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.
Global Think Tanks finds and preserves grey literature from every continent, including voices from the Global South, small organizations missed by conventional search engines, and content recovered from groups that no longer exist.
At a glance
7.5M items
The world’s largest fully-searchable database for some of the world’s most impactful content. Updated daily.
27,500+
More than 27,500 organizations, editorially selected and vetted for quality.
"Discoverability of critical NGO reports is a game changer …[this] shifts evidence and knowledge production towards equitable access!”
Topical, current, real-world knowledge from the field
Third sector organizations work closely with the communities they serve, earning trust and gathering insights others miss. They’re flexible, action focused, and more likely to include underrepresented voices, making their data timely, inclusive, and grounded in real-world issues.
Included are reports, books, articles, working papers, briefs, data sets, tables, charts, media, case studies, blogposts, and statistics.
The database is current and relevant—with 800,000 items added in 2023 or 2024; 63,000 on Hamas or Gaza; and 80,000 on the Ukraine war.
Sample reports
A 2008 report published by Fride, a European think tank for global action, about the post-Taliban international efforts in Afghanistan.
CEDIL's 2023 report highlights the crucial impact of safely managed water, sanitation, and hygiene on health, emphasizing the need to mainstream gender equality and social inclusion due to disparities in benefits.
A 2006 report published by IDASA measuring the social, political and economic atmosphere across Africa.
Content from 220+ countries, in 130+ languages, published by organizations on every continent.
Global perspectives
Global Think Tanks covers organizations around the globe, with careful attention to representing voices from the Global South and other underrepresented regions.
It covers small but influential organizations overlooked by conventional search engines. It restores content recovered from groups that have ceased to exist and content no longer available on the original publishing site.
Global Think Tanks makes grey literature from every continent findable and stable—so that diverse voices can be part of the answer.
Case study: Research for N95 masks
Policy decisions lead to immediate, real-world impact. Policy Commons indexes almost 5,000 reports related to N95 masks, from nearly 1,000 organizations. Researchers can quickly access and analyze data discussing efficiency, availability, and supply-flow strategies.
A recovered publications from FRIDE, once one of the world’s top NGOs
Stabilizing and preserving policy documents
Most policy publications are grey literature—content that isn’t published in books or journals. Because it's not cataloged, grey literature can be hard to find or entirely overlooked. Websites might go down and links break, so you can't reliably cite a document. And grey literature is prone to disappearing entirely.
Global Think Tanks makes backup copies (with permission), so that if the original document disappears, the user sees our copy. And we assign permanent URLs, solving the link-rot problem. You'll find the document, and you can cite it confidently.
We serve
Supports teaching, learning, and research
Engage with content that matters
Access important content as events unfold. Whether you're researching or teaching, connect your team or students with relevant, real-world, real-time information and see how it evolves over time.
Build better syllabi
Build syllabi with links that won't break. Discover syllabi others have uploaded and share your own.
Promote research output
Share student theses, organization reports, and research output with the Policy Commons community.
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