Grey Literature

Contact your subject librarian for tailored advice about finding grey literature for your research topic. The document below guides you through the general process and presents several strategies.  

If you plan to publish your work in a particular journal, you might check how other reviews published in that journal have described their grey literature search strategies.

For systematic and scoping reviews, a grey literature search may be mandatory or strongly recommended. The guidelines you are using for your review (such as Campbell, JBI, Cochrane, CEE) may recommend or require that you search for grey literature resources, including:

• reports (eg from government, non-profits, associations)
• dissertations or theses
• conference abstracts
• clinical trials registry records (for health reviews)
• technical reports
• patents

Published journals may be susceptible to biases against reporting negative or neutral outcomes, a phenomenon known as "positive result bias." Including grey literature or cross-referencing published studies with their grey literature counterparts (e.g. study protocols, clinical trials) can help combat various publication biases.

For other research projects, 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 more diverse perspectives than mainstream publications offer
• More detailed than journal articles, with raw data or more extensive context
• More widely accessible by you and your potential audience