Think Tank Resources
These guides and think tank or nonprofit search engines can help you locate and evaluate think tanks, NGOs, and other organizations that produce policy literature.
Selected Think Tanks
- More Think Tanks
Some recent reporting on Think Tanks
Policy Resources
- Policy CommonsA directory of Think Tanks, IGOs and NGOs, with books, reports and other publications, including the publications of organizations no longer in existence. Researchers can also "follow" an organization or topic, create lists, and limit a search to publications with statistical tables.
- Policy Agendas Project"Initiated in 1993 ... he Policy Agendas Project developed a coding scheme utilizing 19 major topic and 225 subtopic codes. Codes are assigned based on policy content and are mutually exclusive and exhaustive. All activities are categorized, and each item (such as a congressional hearing) is assigned one and only one category...
The series include Congressional hearings, public laws, roll call votes, Congressional Quarterly coverage, Presidential State of the Union speeches, Executive Orders, Supreme Court cases, a sample of New York Times articles, and Gallup’s Most Important Problem public opinion series. In addition, the Project tabulates Congressional Budget Authority using the Office of Management and Budget’s categorization. We also work with the Congressional Bills Project to make available Congressional bills introduced, and with James Stimson to make available Policy Moods opinion data on an issue-by-issue basis. The total number of observations across all series is almost 260,000 (over 500,000 including Congressional bills)." [Website]
Grey Literature Resources for International Agriculture & Development
Not all websites are created equal! Major nongovernmental organizations and various scholarly associations can be rich and authoritative websites, especially for the kind of grey literature not published in mainstream scholarly journals (including white papers, evaluation reports, training materials, and the like). Below are a few useful places to start.
- Cornell International Institute for Food, Agriculture, and Development (CIIFAD)This rich site also has a good section of other international resources at Cornell.
- International Initiative for Impact Evaluation"3ie funds impact evaluations and systematic reviews that generate high quality evidence on what works in development and why. Evidence on development effectiveness can inform policy and improve the lives of poor people."
- International Labour OrganizationThe International Labour Organization (ILO) promotes rights at work, encourages decent employment opportunities, enhances social protection and strengthens dialogue in handling work-related issues.
- International Organization for MigrationIOM is an inter-governmental organization that works closely with governmental, intergovernmental and non-governmental partners to promote humane and orderly migration by providing services and advice to governments and migrants.