“Variously defined as unconventional literature, literature not available via traditional publishing, and publications with little or no general distribution, grey literature represents an immense stash of information that is crucial to various researchers and information professionals.”
Auger, Charles P. Information Sources in Grey Literature. London: Bowker-Saur, 1998.
Searching the grey literature may seem challenging as there are so many sources. You should search the resources that are most relevant to your systematic review.
See also this free online resource for grey literature searching, compiled by CADTH, the Canadian Agency for Drugs and Technologies in Health: Grey Matters: a practical tool for searching health-related grey literature
See 4.S1 Technical Supplement to Chapter 4: Searching for and selecting studies Section 1.1.6 Grey literature databases:
Some of our databases, depending on the discipline, index grey literature as well as journals.
Check the database scope note.
See also the following sources:
Lenus : the Irish Health Repository
40 million publications, 1 million research data sets
from 17,000 content providers and 22 funders linked together for an integrated research search.
Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR)
Social Science Research Network
Social Science Research Network (SSRN) is devoted to the rapid worldwide dissemination of social science research and is composed of a number of specialized research networks in each of the social sciences.
A global library catalogue which combines the catalogues of over 20,000 libraries from over 100 different countries.
Development of a single international trials register at ClinicalTrials.Gov
ICTRP International Clinical Trials Registry Platform
See Medical and health-related trials registers and research registers
This resource provides a listing of trials and research registers and a quick reference guide to the search basics for each resource. If you would like to suggest registers to add to this resource please send the details to Julie Glanville at julie.glanville@york.ac.uk
In addition see Cochrane Handbook Chapter Six: 6.2.3 Unpublished and ongoing studies:
National and international trials registers
Subject-specific trials registers
Pharmaceutical industry trials registers
Trials results registers and other sources
See also:
Cochrane Handbook Chapter Ten: 10.3.2 Including unpublished studies in systematic reviews:
Including unpublished studies in systematic reviews
Higgins, Julian., Green, Sally and Cochrane Collaboration. Cochrane Handbook for Systematic Reviews of Interventions. Chichester, England: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011
Conference Proceedings
See our Theses and dissertations webpage.
See also the full list of national and international theses databases to which we provide access.
• Visually scanning reference lists from relevant studies
• Handsearching key journals and conference proceedings
• Contacting study authors, experts, manufacturers, and other organisations
• Searching relevant Internet resources
Internet searching can be a useful means of retrieving grey literature, such as unpublished papers, reports and conference abstracts. Identifying and scanning specifi c relevant websites will usually be more practical than using a general search engine such as ‘Google’. Reviews of transport and ‘welfare to work’ programmes have reported how Internet searching of potentially relevant websites was effective in identifying additional studies to those retrieved from databases.40, 41 It is worth considering using the Internet when investigating a topic area where it is likely that studies have been published informally rather than in a journal indexed in a bibliographic database. Internet searching should be carried out in as structured a way as possible and the procedure documented (see Appendix 3).
• Citation searching See also http://libguides.library.nuigalway.ie/LiteratureReview/EvaluatingresultsandCitationanalysis
Citation searching involves selecting a number of key papers already identified for inclusion in the review and then searching for articles that have cited these papers. This approach should identify a cluster of related, and therefore highly relevant, papers
Citation searching used to be limited to using Web of Science and Scopus, but other resources (including CINAHL, PsycINFO, and Google Scholar) now include cited references in their records so these are also available for citation searching. Using similar services offered by journals such as the BMJ can also be helpful.
• Using a project Internet site to canvas for studies
University of York. NHS Centre for Reviews & Dissemination. Systematic Reviews : CRD's Guidance for Undertaking Reviews in Healthcare. York: Centre for Reviews & Dissemination, 2009.
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