Grey literature
What is grey literature?
Grey literature is almost anything not published by commercial publishers. A widely accepted definition of grey literature is:
"Information produced on all levels of government, academia, business and industry in electronic and print formats not controlled by commercial publishing i.e. where publishing is not the primary activity of the producing body".1,2
Typical examples of grey literature include conference papers; reports from groups such as government departments, associations and researchers; maps; data sets; unpublished clinical trials; theses and dissertations; patents; standards and newsletters.
Searching for grey literature
Searching for grey literature is not as straight forward as searching for published literature, such as books and journal articles.
Some grey literature can be discovered through library databases, such as conference presentations, standards and industry reports. Other types of grey literature are found on the websites of their authors, such as reports by government departments, or newsletters by professional associations. Searching for grey literature requires a variety of approaches. These are outlined below, organised by material type.
Theses and dissertations
- ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global This link opens in a new window
Includes over 2 million thesis and dissertation citations from around the world, primarily North America and Europe. Over 1 million are available in full text PDF.
Full text is available for dissertations added since 1997.
Each dissertation published since July 1980 includes a 350 word abstract written by the author. Master's theses published since 1988 include 150 word abstracts.
Trove is produced by the National Library of Australia and enables federated searching of a wide range of information sources focusing on Australia and Australians.
To search for Australian and International theses:
- Click on Advanced Search, Books & Libraries
- Select Thesis in the Format field, and tick the Australian content box.
- Enter your terms in the search box and click search
Trove contains all of the thesis records that were previously available via Australasian Digital Theses Program.
Conference proceedings
Library database
Scopus and Web of Science are two major databases containing conference presentation information. Other databases such as ProQuest Central may also contain records of conference presentations. Search for your topic, and narrow the results to conference related records. These may have different names in each database, e.g. 'conference paper' in Scopus and 'meeting abstract' or 'proceedings paper' in Web of Science.
Web searching
Search for your topic, and keywords related to conference presentations, such as 'conference', 'seminar', 'symposium', 'roundtable', 'poster', 'meeting'. For example:
(topic or area of interest) AND (conference OR seminar OR symposium OR roundtable OR poster OR meeting)
Once you have discovered a conference website, search the site by hand, or use the targeted website searching technique. In this technique, we enter our search terms and a specific website domain name into the browser, to retrieve matching documents from that website only.3 For example:
(fish oil OR "omega 3") AND eczema site:edu.au
Reports
Government
Search each Government department website by hand, through browsing or using the website's search box.
Alternatively, use the targeted website searching technique and limit the search to government websites (one country at a time) and PDF files, as reports are often published as PDFs:
(topic) site:gov.au filetype:pdf
Stakeholders and associations
Identify associations by searching for your topic along with keywords related to associations, such as 'association', 'organisation', e.g.
(topic) AND (association OR club OR group OR professional OR organisation OR NGO)
Once you have a list of relevant groups, search each website by hand, through browsing or using the website's search box. Alternatively, use the targeted website searching technique and limit the search to website.
Experts and authors
Discover authors
To discover influential authors, Scopus and Web of Science both allow topic searches to be analysed by author.
Scopus
Search for your topic from the 'documents' search screen > analyze search results > authors.
Web of Science
Search for your topic from the 'Basic search' screen > analyze results > documents by author.
Once you have found an author, select their name to see the publications they have authored.
- Scopus This link opens in a new window
A large abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature and quality web sources. It provides tools to track, analyse and visualise research.
Scopus LibGuide - an in-depth how to use Scopus guide provided by Elsevier.
Scopus records are also searchable in Library Search to signed in users.
- Web of Science This link opens in a new window
Web of Science Core Collection incorporates these citation indexes:
- Science Citation Index
- Social Sciences Citation Index
- Arts & Humanities Citation Index
- Conference Proceedings Citation Index
- Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI)
- Current Chemical Reactions and Index Chemicus.
Find publications by specific authors
To find publications from a single author, use the author search screens in Scopus or Web of Science. To search for an author in Google Scholar, open the menu > advanced search > enter the name in the 'return articles authored by' box.
Searching for an authors' ORCiD profile may also help find their complete list of publications and academic activities. ORCiD stands for Open Researcher and Contributor ID. As a personal identifier, it is not connected to any institution and will therefore contain records of publications made throughout a researchers career.
Contact authors and experts
Asking knowledgeable experts for information on relevant papers and studies may help uncover extra articles or unpublished studies. For each person you contact, keep a record of the date and any information they guide you to.
Clinical trials
Searching for past and ongoing clinical trails in health can help minimise the risk of publication bias.
Databases indexing grey literature
- Overton This link opens in a new window
A searchable index of policy documents, guidelines, think tank publications and working papers. Overton shows where research has been cited in policy worldwide.
Users can create an account to save searches, tags and bookmarks.
These databases collect and index grey literature. Search for your topic within each.
- OAIsterOAIster contains millions of records harvested from open archives across the world. Journal articles, theses, research papers and other digital items are available.
- OpenGreyA databases containing European grey literature.
- WorldCatWorldCat lets you search the collections of over 20,000 libraries across the world. Unpublished documents held by a library might be found in this way.
- Trove This link opens in a new window
Trove is a discovery service focused on Australia, Australians, and items found in Australian Libraries. It includes:
- Books and journals in Australian libraries
- Digitised newspapers and magazines
- Images
- Maps
- Australian digital theses
Use the category options to limit by resource type.
Searching is free, however not all content is immediately accessible online. Availability and licensing are determined by partner organisations based on rights (copyright, cultural and moral rights) and other factors such as funding.
To request an item located in the national database, but not held by Bond University Library, please use Citation Search in Library Search.
- Books and journals in Australian libraries
References
- Farace, D.J. (1998), Foreword - In: Third International Conference on Grey Literature: Perspectives on the Design and Transfer of Scientific and Technical Information, 13-14. November 1997 in Luxembourg. GL'97 Conference Proceedings, p. iii. - (GL Conference Series, ISSN 1386-2316 ; No. 3). ISBN 90-74854-17-6
- Schöpfel, J., C. Stock, D.J. Farace, and J. Frantzen (2005), Citation Analysis in Grey Literature: Stakeholders in the Grey Circuit. – In: The Grey Journal, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 31-40. –ISSN 1574-1796.
- Edwards, I. (2018). Search like a robot: Developing targeted search algorithms. Australian Law Librarian, 26(2), 104. http://allaconference.com.au/2018/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/EDWARDS-Ian.pdf