The Small Arms Survey 2005: Weapons at War (Yearbook 2005) is dedicated to exploring issues surrounding armed conflict, including the sourcing of weapons to conflict areas, weapons use, conflict deaths, and post-conflict disarmament initiatives.

The Small Arms Survey 2006: Unfinished Business (Yearbook 2006) offers new and updated information on small arms production, stockpiles, transfers, and measures, including a review of the International Tracing Instrument.

The Small Arms Survey 2007: Guns and the City (Yearbook 2007) offers new and updated information on small arms production, stockpiles, transfers, and measures, including a special focus on transfer controls.

The Small Arms Survey 2008: Risk and Resilience (Yearbook 2008) presents two thematic sections.
The first examines the problem of diversion as related to stockpiles, international transfers, and end-user documentation. It includes a case study on South Africa and a comic strip illustrating the potential ease by which someone with access to forged documentation can make arrangements to ship munitions virtually anywhere.

The Regional Approach to Stockpile Reduction (RASR) initiative encourages nine affected South-east European governments to develop a pro-active, coordinated, regional approach to secure and destroy excess stockpiles. The RASR initiative's aim is to prevent disastrous explosions and misuse of conventional weapons and munitions.

Unplanned explosions at munitions sites (UEMS) are a significant safety concern for governments and a major security challenge for the international community. The Small Arms Survey has documented more than 500 such incidents in 100 countries over the 35-year period from 1979 to 2013.

Around 875 million firearms are in circulation worldwide, with three-quarters of these in civilian hands, according to Small Arms Survey estimates. These widely-cited calculations are the result of an ongoing programme on inventories and stockpiles—started over a decade ago—to gather comprehensive data on the distribution of small arms and light weapons around the world. The programme has developed an ever larger pool of information that was initially scarce and unsystematic, but now can provide increasingly accurate and up-to-date knowledge of small arms and light weapon holdings.

In the second installment of this two-episode podcast on 'Small Arms Survey 2015: Weapons and the World', Yearbook Coordinator Glenn McDonald and Researcher Claudia Seymour introduce the four case studies discussing armed actors, focusing on their procurement and use of small arms, and their stockpile management practices.