Research Help - Vancouver
Librarian
Librarian
March - December 2017
Reichwald Health Sciences Centre
UBC Okanagan
1088 Discovery Ave
Kelowna, BC V1V 1V7
Key Resources
Grey literature consists of documents produced by government, academic, business or organizations "where publishing is not the primary activity of the producing body." (Greynet)
Examples include annual reports, conference proceedings, technical reports, theses, white papers, and even informal communication such as blogs, emails, or social media posts.
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Grey Matters: a practical search tool for evidence-based medicineDownloadable directory of grey literature producers, with a focus on health technology assessment and drug resources. Download the sources as a Word document from the link on the right.
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des LibrisSearchable access to current public documents issued by Canadian public policy and health research agencies and think tanks, as well as books from over 70 Canadian publishers.
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TRIP databaseIncludes clinical practice guidelines, regulatory documents, evidence synopses, blog posts, and more.
Why Use Grey Literature?
For systematic and scoping reviews, a grey literature search may be mandatory or strongly recommended. For instance, Cochrane's MECIR standards require authors to: "Search relevant grey literature sources such as reports, dissertations, theses, databases and databases of conference abstracts. Searches for studies should be as extensive as possible in order to reduce the risk of publication bias and to identify as much relevant evidence as possible."
For other research projects, the grey literature may be:
- more current, with better coverage of emergent research areas
- a better source of information on policies and programs
- a source of different perspectives than mainstream publications offer
- more detailed than journal articles, with raw data or more extensive context