Academic research is an important path to solve scientific questions and social problems, and then to promote the balanced development of science and society. There are certain corresponding relationships between the scale of academic research activity and its corresponding social undertaking scale and development stages. After revealing these relationships, the modern think tank undertaking development process in the world was divided into three different stages including the forming stage, low-speed adjusting stage and high-speed development stage by the trends of the number of academic research literatures on "think tank" theme in WOS database, and then the development characteristics of three different stages of the modern think tank undertaking in the world were revealed by the methods of word-frequency analysis and content analysis. Finally, the present development situation of modern think tank undertaking in China is analyzed, and by the contrast analysis, we confirm that the modern think tank undertaking in China, although in its infancy, is speeding up along a great path with a leap-type development mode.