Animal Charity Evaluators (ACE) announced the launch of its new Research Database, a searchable collection of thousands of studies, reviews and reports relevant to advocacy for farmed and wild animals. The database was created in partnership with Open Paws, a nonprofit organisation that develops artificial intelligence tools for the animal protection movement.
According to ACE, much of the research that could help animal advocates never reaches them. Studies are scattered across journals, reports and organisations' websites, while search tools were not designed with advocates' needs in mind. In an evidence review on effective advocacy, the lack of centralised ways to find and track research emerged as one of the main barriers to putting findings into practice.
The new database replaces ACE's former Research Library. That library was updated manually, making the process slow and sometimes forcing updates to pause during busy periods. Its filter categories had developed organically over the years without reflecting how users actually search, and searches relied on keyword matching.
In a 2025 user survey, respondents asked for more frequent updates, filters by intervention, animal group and research type, and stronger search capabilities. The Research Database incorporates semantic search, which understands the meaning of a query and finds relevant research even when the words do not match exactly. Each entry is tagged by intervention, outcome, animal group, region and article type, allowing users to narrow their results, for example to research on chicken welfare campaigns in Brazil. New research is added once a week on average.
To make the database sustainable, ACE partnered with Open Paws in 2025, combining its research expertise with its partner's technical AI capabilities. An automated system scans academic databases and websites daily to identify potential new research, but ACE's team reviews every source before it is added. This keeps the database up to date with much less manual maintenance than before.
The database includes studies that can be used by advocates for farmed and wild animals: from peer-reviewed studies, reviews and meta-analyses to research reports and theoretical papers from the movement itself. It covers topics such as the effectiveness of advocacy interventions, the social science of activism, animal welfare science, human–animal relationships, consumer attitudes and dietary change, and animal ethics. It excludes work that primarily serves industries that exploit animals or concerns companion animals.
ACE aims the database at three groups: researchers who need to conduct literature reviews and identify gaps in the findings, advocates who want to support their strategies with reliable sources, and funders looking for promising approaches or seeking to check the evidence behind proposals.
The database complements Better for Animals, ACE's resource that synthesises and critically evaluates research on nearly 30 advocacy interventions: Better for Animals provides ACE's assessment, while the Research Database provides the underlying research itself.
ACE clarifies that including research does not constitute an endorsement of its findings, and that in some cases the full text is unavailable because of paywalls. The database is not exhaustive and its automated tags may not be entirely accurate, so users are encouraged to combine filters with semantic search. The team invites anyone who finds errors or omissions to report them through a feedback form, as the database will continue to grow.
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