LibGuides: For Researchers: Grey literature

What is Grey Literature?

Grey literature is “information produced by all levels of government, academics, business and industry in electronic and print formats not controlled by commercial publishing”.

Grey literature includes:

Theses and dissertations, conference proceedings, newsletters, reports, government documents, informal communications, translations, census data, research reports, technical reports, standards, patents, videos, clinical trials and practice guidelines, eprints, preprints, wiki articles, emails, blogs, listserv archives, repository content.

Grey literature may present a number of challenges for the researcher:

difficult to find
many documents are not web published
older documents may not be archived
short print runs may lead to lack of availability
format and citation information may be inconsistent
volume of material may be over-whelming and consuming
quality of evidence varies.

Web Searching

Google scholar This link opens in a new window
Set up so that Find it @ SCU links automatically appear within Google Scholar in your search results:
1. Click the three horizontal lines (top left) then go to Settings (the cog at the bottom of the list)
2. Click Library links
3. Type in Southern Cross University and click the search button
4. Tick Southern Cross University - Find it @ SCU

MedNar
Mednar is a free, publicly available deep web search engine that uses advanced federated search technology to return high quality results by submitting your search query - in real-time - to other well respected search engines. Mednar then collates, ranks and drops duplicates of the results.

Use Advanced Search to specify where to search (societies, government websites, etc)

Databases indexing grey literature

Database	Type of grey literature
Analysis & Policy Observatory	Public policy research reports, articles and data from academic research centres, think tanks, government and non-government organisations. Also features opinion and commentary pieces, video, audio and web resources particularly for issues facing Australia and New Zealand.
Google Scholar	Articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions, from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities and other web sites.
International HTA Database	Bibliographic information about ongoing and published health technology assessments commissioned or undertaken by HTA organisations from around the world. A valuable source for identifying grey literature as much of the information it contains is only available directly from individual funding agencies.
MedNar	One-stop search across medical societies, NIH resources, other U.S. government websites, and patents.
OAlster	Catalog of millions of records representing open access resources from open access collections worldwide. OAIster includes more than 25 million records representing digital resources from more than 1,100 contributors.
OpenDOAR	Global directory of academic open access repositories containing full-text resources.
Open Grey	Open access to 700.000 bibliographical references of grey literature (paper) produced in Europe and allows you to export records and locate the documents.
Science.gov	Gateway to over 50 million pages of authoritative selected science information provided by U.S. government agencies, including research and development results
WorldWideScience.org	Global science gateway-accelerating scientific discovery and progress through a multilateral partnership to enable federated searching of national and international scientific databases.