Grey literature is “information produced by all levels of government, academics, business and industry in electronic and print formats not controlled by commercial publishing”. (GreyNet)
Grey literature may include, but are not limited to the following types of materials: reports (pre-prints, preliminary progress and advanced reports, technical reports, statistical reports, memoranda, state-of-the art reports, market research reports, etc.), theses, conference proceedings, technical specifications and standards, non-commercial translations, bibliographies, technical and commercial documentation, and official documents not published commercially (primarily government reports and documents) (Alberani, 1990).
It is important to search for unpublished or grey literature in systematic review as it helps to reduce publication bias and increase the comprehensiveness of the review to provide a balanced view of the available evidence (Paez, 2017).
Due to selective publication of clinical research, negative studies are less likely to be published. A review can be biased when it fails to report crucial information that may be hidden in some grey literature. This may threaten the validity of systematic reviews or meta-analyses to inform clinical and policy decisions based on overly optimistic estimates of treatment effectiveness. “Underreporting of negative results introduces bias into meta-analysis, which consequently misinforms researchers, doctors and policymakers.” (Mlinarić, A)
Alberani, V., De Castro Pietrangeli, P., & Mazza, A. M. (1990). The use of grey literature in health sciences: a preliminary survey. Bulletin of the Medical Library Association, 78(4), 358–363.
Paez, A. (2017). Grey literature: An important resource in systematic reviews. J Evid Based Med. https://doi.org/10.1111/jebm.12265
Mlinarić, A., Horvat, M., & Šupak Smolčić, V. (2017). Dealing with the positive publication bias: Why you should really publish your negative results. Biochemia medica, 27(3), 030201-030201. https://doi.org/10.11613/BM.2017.030201
Checklist for national and international health technology web sites, clinical practice guidelines, health economics resources, drug and device regulatory agencies, drug class reviews, drug formulary web sites, clinical trial registries, Canadian health prevalence or incidence databases, etc.
An electronic archive for self-archive papers in the areas of psychology, neuroscience, and linguistics.
GreySource provides examples of grey literature to the average net-user and in so doing profiles organizations responsible for its production and/or processing.
Available through Cochrane Handbook for Systematic Reviews of Interventions (Go to Part2>General methods for Cochrane reviews>Searching for studies>Sources to search>Bibliographic databases>Grey literature databases
A list of organisations providing health information.
New York Academy of Medicine collects grey literature from a list of healthcare related organizations, updated bi-monthly. The Grey Literature Report website and database are no longer updated, but the resources are accessible.
Catalog of millions of records representing open access resources from open access collections worldwide. OAIster includes more than 25 million records representing digital resources from more than 1,100 contributors.
Directory of academic open access repositories. Search for the full-text of material held in open access repositories listed in the Directory using 'Search Repository Contents', or use OpenDOAR to find repositories or groups of repositories that fit particular needs using our 'Find' facility.
Open access to 700,000 European grey literature documents on many subject, including biological and medical sciences.
Access to reports, data and analyses of NIH research activities.
Gateway to over 50 million pages of authoritative selected science information provided by U.S. government agencies, including research and development results.
Global science gateway-accelerating scientific discovery and progress through a multilateral partnership to enable federated searching of national and international scientific databases.
It is an online, open access journal publishing proceedings of conferences, including both peer-reviewed full-length articles and collections of meeting abstracts. Devoted specifically to conference publications, including large collections of articles, meetings of specialized interest and conferences of a cross- or multi-disciplinary nature, each collection is published as a supplement. Content is not restricted to any particular discipline within biomedicine
The Web of Science database contains two conference proceedings citation indexes - a Science index, and a Social Sciences & Humanities Index. To limit your search to these indexes, select them from the list of core collection databases in "Editions" above the menu bar of the Web of Science search page.
This database provides citations to papers and poster sessions presented at major scientific meetings around the world. Subject emphasis since 1995 has been in the life sciences, environmental sciences and the aquatic sciences, while older material also covers physics, engineering and materials science.
Select Publication Type: Conference Abstract, Conference Paper or Conference review from Filter menu or in the advanced search menu. Filter by Conference also available. Embase includes PubMed/MEDLINE records, plus 2900+ journals not indexed in PubMed/MEDLINE, especially from countries outside North America, as well as 300,000+ conference abstracts from 1000 conferences each year (since 2009).
If you know the names of conferences / societies in the area of your systematic review topic, searching by name will lead you to the proceedings, which are usually published on their website
To locate conference proceedings in Scopus, run your source as per usual and then using the refine functions on the left hand side of the results page, limit your results to Conference Papers under the 'Document Type' section.
Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources: articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions, from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities and other web sites. Google Scholar helps you find relevant work across the world of scholarly research.
Internet Archive is a non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites, and more. Started in 1996, they now have 20+ years of archived web history and important web pages.
Mednar is a free, publicly available deep web search engine that uses advanced federated search technology to return high quality results by submitting your search query - in real-time - to other well respected search engines. Mednar then collates, ranks and drops duplicates of the results.
Use Advanced Search to specify where to search (societies, government websites, etc)
Grey literature search engine spanning hundreds of health organizations and government databases
SSRN is a preprint server. It is a searchable online library that enables authors to post their papers and abstracts easily and free of charge. SSRN provides a space for a variety of content types to be accessed beyond the traditional research article, including gray literature, book reviews, multimedia files, and datasets..
OSF is a free, open platform to support your research and enable collaboration. It hosts several partner repositories vary by discipline, region and screening process.
This health sciences preprint server is a collaborative effort between Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, BMJ and Yale. Submissions are screened to deter potential risk to public health.
This repository contains research from the life sciences and is maintained by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. bioRxiv facilitates direct transfer of submissions to participating journals.
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One useful checklist for evaluating grey literature is using AACODS (Authority, Accuracy, Coverage, Objectivity, Date and Significance) Authority - Is the author credible? Accuracy - Is it supported by documented and authoritative references? Is there a clearly stated methodology? Is it in line with other work on the same topic Coverage - Have limitations been imposed and are these stated clearly? Objectivity - Can bias be detected? Date - Can't find the date? Rule of the thumb is to avoid such material Significance - Is it relevant? Would it enrich or have an impact on your research?
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