FPRI’s Think Tanks and Civil Societies Program was initiated in part because there was no single source of information on think tanks. National, regional and selective international databases have been developed but no comprehensive database exited until now. During the last four years data has been collected on over 4500 think tanks from 126 countries. It is the long term goal of the project to periodically collect and analyze information about these organizations through surveys so that national, regional and global trends can be identified.