We are happy to announce the launch of the NGO Knowledge Collective (NKC) Data Portal: ngoknowledgecollective.org.  This website catalogues 3,400 journal articles on nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in development published in English from 1980-2014. Users can identify individual or sets of articles by country or region of study or by searching more than 200 keywords related to sectors and development issues. Each article is tagged with the frequency of selected keywords in the text, allowing users to fine-tune their searches and analyze the prevalence of these keywords in relation to citation information. Each article entry in the data portal contains a link to the article permanent DOI location on the internet.  We continue to add articles published from 2015 forward.

The portal also includes a topic model visualizer, allowing users to identify literature using topics pre-generated through machine-learning, rather than just keywords.  For example, the topic model visualizer allows users to identify articles from the early 1980s on NGOs providing small loans before the term “microcredit” entered the literature.

The NKC works against the “silo” effect in the study of NGOs. The data portal builds on a four-year effort to collect and synthesize journal articles across social science disciplines, geographies, and methods.  We hope that the NKC Data Portal will be the “first stop” in research on NGOs, making it easy for researchers to identify the full range of articles on topics of interest, as well as to identify unanswered questions.  We invite you to use the data portal – let us know when you do, and we will add your published work to our bibliography. Help us further build the intellectual community studying NGOs in development.

PIs of the NGO Knowledge Collective are Allison Schnable and Jennifer Brass (Indiana University), Rachel Sullivan Robinson (American University), and Wesley Longhofer (Emory University). Read the findings from our systematic review of the NGO Literature from 1980-2014 in World Development, or contact us at ngoknoweldge@gmail.com.