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Find Grey Literature

Contributor: Jacqueline Kreller-Vanderkooy

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What is grey literature?

  • Grey literature is any information that is not typically produced, published or distributed through traditional or commercial publishing channels.
  • Examples of grey literature include: patents, technical reports, theses and dissertations, conference proceedings, market and industry research, working papers, white papers, fact sheets, standards, policy statements, guidelines, government documents, pre-prints, and more. 

How do I find grey literature?

  • Methods for searching grey literature depend on the kind of grey literature you are looking for.
  • Consider what kind of grey literature contains the information you need. What organizations or individuals are likely to produce the information you need, and in what formats do they provide it?
  • Once you know the type of grey literature you need, use an approach suited to finding that type.
  • There are also some databases that gather different types of grey literature into one place.

Finding conference proceedings

  • Conference proceedings are published records of scholarly conferences.
  • Conference proceedings may contain varying levels of detail, from titles of conference presentations only, to abstracts only, to papers that resemble journal articles, to full verbatim records of speakers’ remarks.
  • Many databases that contain scholarly sources include conference proceedings.

Finding government documents

  • Governments publish many kinds of documents and information, such as data and statistics, legislation and regulations, educational materials, guides to government programs, and reports on a wide variety of topics.

Finding documents published by non-governmental organizations (NGOs)

  • Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are usually non-profit entities, independent of any government, that offer services, provide information and expertise, and/or influence policy.
  • NGOs may publish reports, data, statistics, technical guidance, and more.
  • Use Google to locate websites of relevant NGOs; NGO publications are often available from their websites.
  • The websites of many NGOs allow searching and/or browsing of their publications.
  • Use Google to search within a website by adding site:domain to your search.
    • For example, searching Google for site:cape.ca fossil fuels will search for the words fossil fuels on pages within the cape.ca domain (the website of the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment).
  • Add filetype:PDF to your Google search to limit results to PDFs only; this approach can help identify publications since they are often in PDF format.
    • For example, searching Google for fossil fuels filetype:PDF will retrieve PDF documents only from a search for fossil fuels.

Finding pre-prints

  • Pre-prints are un-peer-reviewed manuscripts (usually of scholarly journal articles).
  • Researchers in many disciplines are increasingly publishing pre-prints of their work online for free in pre-print archives.
  • Pre-prints can provide access to very recent research.
  • Pre-prints should be read even more critically than a peer-reviewed journal article, because they have not received the level of expert scrutiny that peer-review brings.

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