What is grey literature?
Grey literature refers to materials or research produced outside the traditional academic (scholarly/peer reviewed) or commercial (popular) publishing channels. It is important for literature reviews because it can provide more complexity, detail, and timely information on a given topic. Also, it can help you avoid the issue of publication bias. Typically produced by government agencies, organizations, academic departments, and private companies, materials include but are not limited to:
- Technical and statistical reports
- Dissertations or Theses
- Conference papers and proceedings
- Bibliographies
- Government reports or documents
- Working or white papers
Where can I locate grey literature?
Library
We recommend using the ProQuest database to locate grey literature within the library. You can access and search this database by taking the following steps:
1. From the library's homepage, click the Journal Articles button beneath the Library OneSearch box.
2. Then click on the ProQuest database link.
3. Locate the Source Type box in the bottom left portion of the page and select the following boxes to limit your results to only display grey literature, such as:
- Conference papers and proceedings
- Dissertations and theses
- Government and official publications
- Reports
- Working or white papers
4. Then proceed to type your search terms into the advanced search boxes near the top of the page before executing your search.
The Web
Another great place to locate grey literature is by using an internet search engine such as Google.
Using a basic search, you can limit your search results to websites where you are likely to find grey literature such as organizational and government sites by adding Site:.gov or Site:.org to the end of your search. This will ensure that all the results retrieved from this search are from these types of websites.
For additional shortcuts you can use to improve your internet searches please see the library’s Advanced Search Techniques tip sheet.
Please note that any group or person can publish materials online, and sometimes an organization might sound reputable even though it is not. Therefore, you should read the About Us or Mission Statement located near the top or bottom of the organization’s website to see what their agenda is and run a quick Google search to see if any news events might give an outside perspective to what the organization is about.
Here are some additional tools you can use to evaluate web resources:
If you still have questions you can chat in real-time with a librarian here.