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 includes:
Theses and dissertations, conference proceedings, newsletters, reports, government documents, informal communications, translations, census data, research reports, technical reports, standards, patents, videos, clinical trials and practice guidelines, eprints, preprints, wiki articles, emails, blogs, listserv archives, repository content.
Grey literature may present a number of challenges for the researcher:
Check also the lists included in Cochrane Handbook for Systematic Reviews of Interventions (2008, p. 114-117)
The Theses link on UniSC Library's guides provides details for how to find Australian and international electronic and print theses.
Source | What is included? |
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Australian Policy Online | Australian public policy reports and articles from academic research centres, think tanks, government and non-government organisations. Also features opinion and commentary pieces, video, audio and web resources focused on the policy issues facing Australia. A partnership of ANU's Australian National Institute for Public Policy and Swinburne's Institute for Social Research |
Google Scholar |
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One-stop search across medical societies, NIH resources, other U.S. government websites, and patents. |
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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. |
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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. |
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A component of the PsycNET site. Grey literature database relating to psychology, behavioural sciences, and health. Full-text is available for the majority of records (approximately 70% and growing), in addition to a complete abstract record. Coverage consists primarily of material written for professionals but disseminated outside of peer-reviewed journals. |
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Science.gov | Gateway to over 50 million pages of authoritative selected science information provided by U.S. government agencies, including research and development results |
WorldWideScience.gov | Global science gateway-accelerating scientific discovery and progress through a multilateral partnership to enable federated searching of national and international scientific databases. |
Source | What is included? | How to search |
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BIOMED CENTRAL MEETINGS | Includes meeting abstracts published in BioMed Central Journals, usually includes abstracts and conference name. | Browse list of journals indexing conferences. |
MEDLINE | Includes some citations to individual poster/paper abstracts – may include abstracts. Journal supplements often not included. |
Limit search by "Publication Type" to:
or MESH heading "Congresses as topic" |
SCOPUS | Over 500 conference proceedings, 4.6 million conference papers from proceedings and journals |
Limit search by "Document Type" to:
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WEB OF SCIENCE |
Includes Conference Proceedings Citation Index - Science, and Conference and Proceedings Citation Index - Social Science and Humanities. Rarely includes abstract. |
Limit search by "Document Type" to:
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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.
BASE is one of the world's most voluminous search engines especially for academic web resources. BASE provides more than 240 million documents from more than 8,000 content providers. You can access the full texts of about 60% of the indexed documents for free (Open Access). BASE is operated by Bielefeld University Library (Germany).
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).
OpenMD is another large free search engine similar to MedNar.