Grey Literature

Your first questions may well be what is "Grey Literature" and will it be useful to include it in my research strategy?

"Papers are often written to inform funding bodies about the results of research projects, to support grant applications, to inform rapidly a specific scientific community, to present preliminary results at conferences or as dissertations. Such material is disseminated quickly, often in limited numbers, before or without the formal publication process." (The European Association for Grey Literature Exploitation, 2001).

So "Grey Literature" could include, for example, research and technical papers, government reports, pre-prints, market surveys and committee working papers.

There are a host of websites that will help you exploit this potentially very useful body of information. Good ones that are worth further exploration include:

  • Gray literature: Resources for locating unpublished research - Authored by Brian Mathews at George Washington University; an extensive guide to Web sites that aid understanding of the nature of gray literature as well as various search tools. Focusing on freely available resources offering some full-text coverage, while the majority of these selections concentrate upon scientific and technical literature, other resources have also been included where appropriate.
  • Google Scholar - Google Scholar enables you to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research.
Remember you could also use retrieval tools such as subject gateways to find other web-based resources on this topic.