Abstract: Private think tanks play an important role in promoting scientific decision-making, but the professionality of their research output has always been controversial. Unveiling the current situation of Chinese private think tanks’ research output and understanding its characteristics and significance is imperative to the improvement of the decision-making services of these institutions. This article uses a Python crawler to obtain information on the publications of 58 Private think tanks from the China National Knowledge Infrastructure platform and performs a quantitative analysis on the 14,870 documents crawled. It then selects 10 private think tanks and 10 university-affiliated think tanks with similar comprehensive influence and conducts a comparative study on the 6951 and 7381 articles crawled, to better understand the status of published articles in private think tanks with university think tanks as a reference system. The study finds that published articles are a foundation for their long-term development and confirms that private think tanks maintain an appropriate balance among academic, social and policy influence. The research output of private think tanks is extensive and diverse; its research mode conforms to the characteristics of Mode 2 Knowledge Production, which is more heterogeneous and diversified. The professionality of their research output is not entirely determined by academic influence. Much of the research output outside the published articles of private think tanks need a more suitable third-party evaluation system for appraisement.