Finding Grey Literature: Searching for Grey Literature

Search Engines

Search engines are valuable tools for discovering resources beyond traditional academic journals. They allow you to access a wide variety of information, including reports, policy documents, and other forms of grey literature, expanding the scope of your research. By using search engines, you can uncover diverse perspectives and sources that may not be indexed in academic databases, broadening your understanding of the topic.

Set Review Limits

These tools can return a vast number of results, so it is important to set boundaries on the number of sources you plan to review. For instance, you might choose to review the first 5-10 pages of results for a comprehensive overview or select the number of sources that best matches the scope of your project.

Simplify Large Search Strings

Using long search strings with multiple term sets is often less effective in search engines due to the vast number of resources they index. Instead, it is more efficient to conduct several focused searches, each targeting a specific aspect of your topic. This approach helps to refine your results and ensures that you retrieve the most relevant and targeted information.

Using Data from Organizations for Research

Another effective strategy is to identify organizations relevant to your topic and search for the documents, reports, or data they produce. Organizations often generate valuable information that may not be published in academic journals. Below is a list of common types of organizations that may produce relevant grey literature. While this list is not exhaustive, it can help guide your search by highlighting institutions that are likely to produce information relevant to your project.

Government Agencies

The federal government funds research and creates numerous documents and datasets. Local governments also produce information relevant to their areas and conduct studies to support initiatives and policies. While government reports are often freely available, they can be challenging to locate. You can use .gov and .org domain filters on Google Advanced Search to help you find government resources more easily.

Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs)

These organizations often collect data to further their advocacy goals, which can be useful if they focus on topics relevant to your research. They frequently post blogs or news articles on their websites.

Research Groups

Investigating resources from research groups can be beneficial because they conduct specialized research in niche subject areas. However, some reports may be hidden behind paywalls.

Professional Associations

These associations host conferences or workshops on a wide array of topics that may be relevant to your research. Exploring websites and conferences can provide insights into ongoing research and current topics in a field. You can often find conference papers and blogs, although some documents might have limited access for members only.

Corporations

Corporations innovate new technologies and conduct industry research that might be useful for your project. It is important to evaluate information from these organizations for potential biases due to their financial motives.

Social Media

Exploring blogs or social media posts can be a useful method for finding grey literature. However, it is essential to ensure the information comes from a reputable source, such as an established researcher or well-recognized organization. To further verify credibility, cross-check the information with other similar sources. Additionally, searching for grey literature on social media presents unique challenges, including the potential for posts to be deleted or modified, and the fact that many platforms require user accounts for access to certain content.

Useful Tools

Reaching out to colleagues in your field can be invaluable for discovering useful grey literature resources. Additionally, reviewing previous systematic or scoping reviews with documented search strategies can provide insights into how past researchers have located grey literature on various topics.

Keep Track of Your Searches

By documenting where you searched and your search strategies, you can easily reproduce your results or adjust your strategies as needed.

Download PDFs of the Source

Webpages can change or be removed, and links may become broken over time. To ensure continued access to important information, consider saving sources as PDFs. On Windows computers, you can use the Ctrl+P shortcut to save a PDF of most webpages.  Alternatively, the Zotero Connector extension for your web browser allows you to save a snapshot of a webpage, preserving it exactly as it was when you first accessed it.  The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine will capture a snapshot of the webpage and create a URL to link back to that instance of the webpage on that date.

Use a Citation Manager

Citation managers can help organize your citations and PDFs, simplifying the process of reviewing and citing in your writing. However, please note that some grey literature databases do not provide tools to export records, and you may need to enter sources manually.

Evaluate Sources

It is important to remember that grey literature is not peer-reviewed. While it can still be considered reliable and cited in academic articles, you should ensure its accuracy by considering potential biases and cross-checking it with information from other sources. You can learn more on the  Evaluating Grey Literature Sources page of this guide.

Contact the Library

If you have any questions that are not answered by this guide, please feel free to reach out to the library!