What is Grey Literature?

In some disciplines, you may hear about using grey literature in your research. Grey literature is “information produced on all levels of government, academia, business and industry in electronic and print formats not controlled by commercial publishing i.e. where publishing is not the primary activity of the producing body”^[1].

There could be grey literature that falls under some themes like:

• Scholarly (e.g. theses and dissertations, conference proceedings, research reports, etc.)
• Government and Industry (e.g. government websites, technical reports, white papers, census data, etc.)
• Community-based (e.g. newsletters, emails, blogs, social media and social networking sites, etc.)

There are many more examples that are discipline-specific but assess your own research needs to see what may be relevant to your work.

Learning how to do a scholarly search is important to your work, but what can also be helpful to your search process is understanding more broadly different types of literature that are available. Having diverse sources can enrich your research and ensure you are looking at all possible perspectives on your topic.

Searching for Grey Literature

Databases and Catalogues

If you want to search within a database or catalogue, you can limit the resource type of your query to those that are typically considered grey literature.

Google and Google Scholar

Google and Google Scholar are popular places to try and search for grey literature. If you want to search outside of Google, you can try DuckDuckGo, which is a free search engine that does not collect user information, and can help results not be influenced by factors based on your digital profile (e.g. geographic location)

Other advice:

• Google’s site function limit a particular institutions’ website or domain name. (Ex. inputting Site:gov.on.ca to limit search results to Ontario government sites)
• File type searches can search for particular document formats, such as filetype:pdf

Below are a handful of custom Google pre-built searches targeting several provincial, national, and international organizations you might want to try out:

• Canadian Health Departments and Agencies
  • Searches websites of Canada’s federal and provincial health departments, public health agencies, and collaborating centers
• Ontario Public Health Units
  • Searches all websites of Ontario’s Public Health Units at once
• NGO Search
  • Searches across hundreds of non-governmental (NGO) websites
• IGO Search
  • Searches across IGO websites, which include national organizations such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the World Health Organization (WHO)

For more search techniques and support using search engines, check out our Google and Google Scholar series!

Grey Literature at Western Libraries

Whenever you engage with grey literature, you may get conflicting perspectives on searching for sources outside of traditional scholarly systems and publishing. The term grey literature itself may imply it is not reliable or trustworthy to some realms of academia, or used as a fodder instead of real, solid data.

Western Libraries current curriculum challenges what we define as grey literature, as Knowledge Justice challenges the notion of whose evidence is best, and who is still missing in these conversations.

However, it may be difficult to move away from the term grey literature, as your experience at Western is still rooted in the academic Eurowestern institution. With these tutorials, you will still learn how to perform the scholarly search, but you will also gain critical reflective skills to broadly understand the literature as a whole.

Having a Knowledge Justice-lens isn’t only applicable to equity-based topics you determine with a checklist criterion. We want to challenge your framework of best evidence to look broadly and see what and who is missing from the conversations you have!

To read more about comprehensive search strategies for diverse voices, check out Knowledge Justice in the Helping Professions Chapter 4, which series of chapters unpack adjusting our language, strategies in Eurowestern systems, search engines, artificial intelligence as a tool, seeking lived experience, and approaching Indigenous Knowledges through relationships!

As always, contact us at Western Libraries for more help!

Resources

At Western Libraries

• Western Libraries Research Guide: Knowledge Synthesis (Grey Literature) *note: this guide is geared towards systematic and scoping reviews, but still serves as a great resource for your understanding of grey literature
• Western Libraries Research Guide: Patents
• Western Libraries Research Guide: Standards
• Western Libraries Research Guide: Theses and Dissertations
• Western University Open Repository

Other Grey Literature Guides, Catalogues, or Databases

• Canada Commons (through Western Libraries Databases)
• Cochrane Handbook on Grey Literature
• Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)
• Grey Matters Database (CDA-AMC) (Canada’s Drug Agency-L’Agence des medicaments du Canada)
• Internet Archive
• OAIster
• OpenDOAR (Directory of Open Access Repositories)
• OpenGrey (Notes: Lacks search functionality. No longer current. Archive of contents up to end of 2020 can be downloaded as file.)
• Policy Commons
• Social Sciences Research Network
• Statistics Canada
• USA Stats
• University of Toronto: Grey Literature Tutorial
• University of Toronto Research Guide: Grey Literature