The Rise of DocuTicker - Tracking Government and Think Tank Reports

One of my favourite international sites for monitoring government, NGO and think tank reports is DocuTicker, a daily update provided by the librarian team that created Resourceshelf.

DocuTicker offers an RSS feed. It also organizes items by broad categories, including one called Legal and law enforcement. Not surprisingly, much of the material is American, but not all.

Recently, DocuTicker has featured reports on the fragile nature of the rule of law in Russia (Foreign Policy Centre in the UK), a German report entitled Empathy and Emotions: Do Women Judge Better? (available via SSRN), a report on road rage (Parliament of Victoria in Australia), a global survey of fraud risk in emerging markets (Ernst & Young) and much more.

The most recent issue of the UK information industry newsletter FreePint features an article by DocuTicker's Shirl Kennedy about the selection process used by the site to sift through the many association, government, and other reports that could be of interest on any given day.

Some of the points:

• DocuTicker tries to "include important documents many people are looking for, i.e. those mentioned in the news or that are issued on a regular basis"
• "Everything ... includes a link to a freely available full-text report"
• There is "a good mix of subject matter, with an emphasis on high interest topics, such as education, health care, social and cultural issues"
• Posts contain an abstract "taken directly from the document or from a press release issued by the agency responsible for the document" - Docuticker does not provide commentary or value judgments, it assumes readers are smart enough to figure out biases
• DocuTicker tries to include international materials and asks that its non-American readers notify it of interesting reports out there