Policy Commons - one month full access trial (March 2026)!

Hello. I should introduce myself: I'm Toby Green, the publisher for Policy Commons. In this video, I'm going to introduce you to Policy Commons, explain some of its features, and walk you through the site.

I set up Policy Commons in 2019. Previously, I had been the publisher at the OECD. During my time there, I kept hearing from librarians and users how difficult it was to find literature from international organisations, non‑governmental organisations, and other groups such as think tanks. When I left the OECD, I had this idea in my mind that there needed to be a solution to that problem — and hopefully Policy Commons is that solution.

We launched Policy Commons at the beginning of 2021. As you can see, we are now indexing just over 11 million items from a pool of 31,000 organisations. We only have content for about half of these organisations, and I will explain later why that is the case.

Policy Commons is organised into modules. We currently have four modules. The first module was Global Think Tanks. As its name implies, we gather content from international organisations, non‑governmental organisations, think tanks, projects, networks, and other groups producing grey literature in policy. This was the original launch component of Policy Commons. We now have just over five million items indexed, and we provide full access to most of that content. It comes from a directory of 24,000 organisations, which grows all the time. This is certainly the world's largest database of content from think tanks and other policy organisations.

We then moved to Cities. We acquired a large collection of urban documents for North American cities and have expanded it by crawling more than 600 North American cities and urban agencies. We now index just over one million items from those sources. The popularity of the North American Cities collection led us to develop World Cities, which now includes around one and a half million items from roughly a thousand cities worldwide, and we are adding new ones constantly.

Our newest module, launched at the end of 2023, is World Governments. It currently contains 3.7 million items and is continuing to grow. We gather content from about 150 government entities, including parliaments, ministries, government agencies, and other governmental bodies.

That gives you a quick overview of where our content comes from.

The best way to explore the content is through search, so I’ll demonstrate a few searches. I’ll start with “climate AND Bangladesh”. Note that I put AND in capitals because we support standard Boolean operators. Using AND, this is a full‑text search, meaning we look for the two words anywhere in the document — title, abstract, or full text. As you might expect, this search retrieves a large number of items: nearly 75,000 reports. On the left, you can see most results come from the Think Tanks module, but we also have substantial content from governments and some from cities.

You can also view results that come from our tables tool, which I will demonstrate later. There are 21 organisations matching this search and two topics. You can filter your results by publication type — we cover a very wide range of content types. Although the majority are reports, we also index articles, projects, blogs, datasets, and more. Mentions, which I will explain later, is a new module that has not yet been formally launched.

You can filter by organisation by clicking “view more” and typing the organisation’s name — for example, DFID. This allows you to refine your results quickly.

We index content in many languages. The majority is in English, but even this search retrieves items in French, Spanish, and other languages. You can filter by year, and we also attach topics to content when we analyse it, so you can filter by topic as well. You can even see when items were added to the database.

Each record shows the title, the source organisation, the publication date, the language, and a summary. With grey literature, summaries or abstracts are often missing, so we generate summaries automatically using our tools. If the summary contains ellipses, that generally means the summary has been created by our system.

Below the summary, we display highlighted snippets from the full text so you can judge whether the document is relevant. If you want to view the item, click its title, which opens the full record. To access the report, click “view”, which takes you directly to the organisation’s website. This is important: we do not serve the content ourselves because we do not want to divert traffic away from these organisations — their websites need traffic to remain visible to Google. If the link breaks, we have a preserved copy of the PDF in our archive and can make it available to you.

You can share the item via social media or email, and you can export a citation in RIS format. Citations link back to the Policy Commons page because we know that our page will remain stable, even if the original website disappears. We also provide tools such as lists, which I’ll explain shortly.

If you find an item that seems incorrect — wrong author, incorrect metadata, or something that should not be on Policy Commons — you can click “Flag this item” to alert us.

We support Boolean operators such as AND, OR, and NOT, and you can combine them. For example:

climate AND (weather OR Bangladesh)

climate AND NOT weather

climate OR weather AND Bangladesh

We also offer proximity search. For example:

climate NEAR Bangladesh

This finds the two words within 15 words of each other. You can refine it further:

climate NEAR/5 Bangladesh

This finds the terms within five words. Proximity search is powerful, but you cannot mix it with Boolean logic.

You can sort results by newest first, and you will see that we add new content every day. You can export results as CSV or RIS.

We also provide an Advanced Search screen, which allows you to create very complex searches — for example, specifying where terms should appear (such as in the title only), limiting by year, organisation, content type, country, and more.

Now let me show you how to build a list. Suppose you are running a project on Indian agriculture or preparing a class and want to create a reading list. Run your search, then add items to a new list — for example, “Indian Agriculture”. You can add items directly from the results or from individual item pages. You can even add organisations to a list.

You must be signed in to create lists. Once in your list, you can edit the title, add a description, change the display style, or make the list private, institutional‑only, or public. You can also add an image and share or export the list.

Lists can support all kinds of use cases. For example, we created a list of all reports mentioned in an article in The Economist about the Ukraine–Russia war, because the article did not provide links. We also created a list for Australia’s Voice referendum, and one for COP28 capturing all key reports and decisions.

If you find a search particularly useful, you can turn it into an alert. Simply click “follow”. You’ll receive emails whenever new items match your search. You can adjust the frequency or unfollow at any time. Follows also act as saved searches that you can re‑run easily.

Next is our tables tool. We scan PDFs for tables. If we find one, you can view it and extract it as a CSV file. This is especially useful for large statistical tables, saving you the time of re‑typing data manually.

We also maintain an organisations database. For example, searching “World Bank” (in quotation marks) brings up its page. The World Bank has two repositories, and if you search only one on their website, you may miss content. Policy Commons aggregates both, allowing you to search them together.

You can also search across multiple organisations at once — for example, run a search across the World Bank, IMF, and OECD simultaneously.

If you have your own content to add, you can use the Upload tool. You may upload files if you own the copyright or have permission. Otherwise, you can submit a link. You can add title, authors, tags, dates, and a summary, and choose whether to keep the item private, institutional, or public.

We do not allow users to add organisations directly, because we verify organisations before adding them to ensure they produce trustworthy content. If you think an organisation should be included, you can contact us. Once we add it, we will harvest and index its content automatically — sometimes within 24 hours.

Finally, our new Mentions module analyses the full text of all 11 million reports and identifies where organisations are referenced in any capacity — authorship, funding, involvement, or simply being mentioned. This is not a citation index but a way to show which organisations are influential within a given topic. For example, in a search on Indian agriculture, the most frequently mentioned organisation might be the European Union, followed by the Asian Development Bank, OECD, Harvard, and so on — even if some of these might not be organisations you would immediately expect.

We built Policy Commons with the goal of making grey literature easier to discover and more useful. We are also working to integrate grey literature into the scholarly record. We already partner with Google Scholar, and we are in the process of integrating with Clarivate, ProQuest, and EBSCO so that this content can be discovered alongside books and journals.

I hope you will join us in helping bring grey literature into the scholarly record, and that Policy Commons will help you find content — and perhaps share your own grey literature with researchers around the world. If you have any questions, please do get in touch.

Thank you very much for your time today.