This section of the guide introduces researchers to the leading print and electronic resources to perform multilateral treaty research. Multilateral treaty research generally follows a straightforward approach. Most modern multilateral treaties have been deposited with the United Nations Treaty Collection External (UNTC), which is an excellent place to start your research. Article 102 External of the Charter of the United Nations states, "Every treaty and every international agreement entered into by any Member of the United Nations after the present Charter comes into force shall as soon as possible be registered with the Secretariat and published by it." You can also find the text of multilateral treaties through the index or repository from the jurisdiction of individual parties to the treaty.

The Consolidated Treaty Series by Parry provides coverage of treaties beginning in 1648 through the end of World War I in 1918. The United Nations Cumulative Treaty Index by Kavass and the United Nations Treaty Series (UNTS) both provide access to treaties deposited with the United Nations since 1946.

Rohn's World Treaty Index provides coverage for treaties from around 1900-1980, and provides indexing for treaties in collections like the UNTS. While Rohn's focuses on treaties in the UNTS, around 22,000 treaties in the index are found in other treaty collections, making this an especially helpful resource.

Finally, The League of Nations Treaty Series (LNTS) provides historical coverage of multilateral treaties between 1920-1946, and also covers selected treaties back to 1871.

Both the United Nations Treaty Series and the League of Nations Treaty Series are available online through the UNTC, and treaties can be found using their corresponding UNTS or LNTS citations. These citations will be the same in both the print and electronic versions of the compilations. The UNTC has digitized over 250,000 treaties, treaty communications, and treaty actions External.

For treaties in the Consolidated Treaty Series collections by Parry, you will likely see a citation to C.T.S. Treaties in the Kavass collection will have a corresponding KAV number. These citations can be used interchangeably with the physical resource and digitized versions of these compilations available from HeinOnline.