What is Grey Literature and how do you search it?
Grey Literature is a body of materials that cannot be found easily through conventional channels such as publishers or commercial databases. The reason for this is that publishing is not the primary activity of the producing body.
This body of literature could be conference proceeding, reports from governmental or NGO agencies or even websites.
Grey Literature is a potential useful source of material, if you are prepared to do the extra work to use it. Typically grey literature has to be searched using multiple tools. The links below contain links to specific sites and search tools to find grey literature.
Google Scholar is a sub set of the Google web search engine that indexes the full text and metadata of scholarly literature. It supports a large number of publishing formats and disciplines. A great deal of grey literature sits on freely accessible academic servers.
https://scholar.google.ca/
Grey Matters, from From CADTH, is a tool for searching health-related grey literature.
https://www.cadth.ca/resources/finding-evidence/grey-matters
This is a good starting point produced by the University of Illinois at Chicago.
http://researchguides.uic.edu/c.php?g=252186&p=1684970
A similar resource from New York University.
http://guides.nyu.edu/greylithealth
