Political science, governance, and international affairs: Policy, law, government/ IGO/ NGO info

Not all important literature is in peer-reviewed journals

This page identifies tools for finding four types of literature that can be important to political scientists: policy analyses and other "gray literature" from research institutes and professional associations; legal literature (laws and regulations; cases; legal scholarship);  government publications (US domestic and US foreign relations, and intergovernmental and nongovernment association publications.

Think tanks, policy papers, "gray literature"

Professors and other people with advanced academic degrees present their expertise in other settings beside peer-reviewed journals and scholarly books.  They may produce reports and analyses for governments, non-profit organizations, corporations, and all sorts of research institutes; they also distribute research for comment at academic conferences.  While these sources are often created with academic rigor, they commonly do not go through full peer review before publication.  Nonetheless, especially regarding recent events and hot topics in politics and policy, such "gray literature" can be important bridges between journalism and traditional academic publications. 

US federal government information sources

By law, the US Government Publishing Office is the "official, digital, and secure source for producing, protecting, preserving, and distributing the official publications and information products of the federal government," making it the world's largest publisher.  Government "documents"  range from tourist brochures to long books, speeches to astronomical data, gardening advice to technical reports, budget reports to the laws of the land. 

Most GPO publications have been published online since the late 1990s and are listed in our library's Discovery Search (Primo) catalog: GPO has had an online-only publication policy since the early 2020s.  

Extensive digitization of older documents (including many outside GPO's mandate) has been done by government agencies, by commercial database vendors (Voxgov, HeinOnline, ProQuest, Readex), and by nonprofits (LLMC-Digital, HathiTrust, Internet Archive); see entries for their collections elsewhere in this guide or in the libraries Databases A-Z directory.

The library's most popular physical "Docs" are in a special section on the 5th floor of Newman library, identified and stored according to GPO's unique "SuDoc" call number system; you can find them in our catalog.  Understanding the SuDoc number is crucial for locating physical government publications in the library. 

The University of Montana has a good SuDoc Basics libguide.  See also this University of Minnesota SuDoc Tutorial on YouTube.  Don't be reluctant to ask a librarian for help.

Accurate SuDuc numbers are necessary for requesting delivery from library storage or from other libraries via ILLiad.  You can find SuDoc numbers in:

Few libraries cataloged federal documents before the late 1970s; at Tech are housed in offsite storage. For earlier SuDoc numbers, it is often faster and easier to use the print indexes to the Monthly Catalog of U.S. Government Publications, 1895-2004, shelved near the Docs stacks (start at call no Z1223 .A183) than to fight with the online PDF indexes of US government documents from GPO.

US foreign relations information

Surveys of US National Intelligence Published Outputs (Webinars)

Archived 45-minute webcasts provide overviews for exploring publicly available information from US intelligence agencies. Presenter is Albert Chapman (Purdue University Library). Offered in 2018-19 as part of the US Government Publishing Office's "FDLP Academy" training sessions for librarians (but not geeky)

Legal databases

Comparative law: primary sources

Intergovernmental and nongovernmental organizations

Intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) and private, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) often partner to address social, environmental, economic, technical, and human rights issues.  For research on topics on transnational and international concern, it is often appropriate to search both kinds of entities, using the same search terms.

IGO Custom Search Engine

The IGO Custom Search Engine searches across hundreds of IGO websites, including the United Nations, World Bank, UN Development Program (UNDP), Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), European Union, the Asian Development Bank, and many others.

NGO Custom Search Engine

Like its IGO counterpart, use the NGO Custom Search Engine search across hundreds of NGO websites worldwide.


These Google Custom Search Engines (CSE) are a project of the International Documents Taskforce (IDTF) of the American Library Association (ALA). For more background on this project, including links to the IGo and NGO lists included in these searches, please see the IDTF wiki.