NURS 111: Discipline of Nursing

Much grey literature is of high quality.

Grey literature is often the best source of up-to-date research on certain topics, such as rural poverty or the plight of unhoused people in Victoria.

In the health sciences, grey literature is vital for developing a more complete view of research on a particular topic and for producing systematic reviews and other rigorous approaches to evidence synthesis. Grey literature can be a good source for data, statistics and very recent research results.

Because there's no publisher-enforced limitation on length, these reports can be much more detailed than the journal literature. They can help to offset issues related to publication bias, such as:

• Publication lag  Results of studies may appear in grey literature, such as conference proceedings, a year or more before they appear in a peer-reviewed publication.

• Positive result bias  Study results that show a negative or no effect are published in scholarly journals less often than those with a positive effect. Those negative results may be found by reviewing the grey literature.

Grey literature is particularly important in the area of health policy, where health technology assessments, economic evaluations, health systems impact assessments and comparative effectiveness research are of special interest.

The following is a very short list of some of the organizations that produce or house grey literature. 

Most grey literature is free. However, some sources of grey literature, such as market research firms, charge for access to their material.

Where there is a charge, don't forget to check to see if you can get it through Interlibrary Loan.

The danger of grey literature is that some "think tanks" that publish reports and working papers have their own political or social agendas. In a few notorious cases, organizations have been set up for public relations reasons to promote bogus research. It is important to cross-check information from grey literature sources against information derived elsewhere.

The criteria you would use to evaluate grey literature are the same as those used to evaluate any kind of information. Consider:

• Authorship. Not all grey literature will have a named author (or authors). If it does, you will want to consider whether the author or authors are knowledgeable in the field and whether they have any affiliations that might bias their views. If no authors are named, you will want to consider closely the source that produced the report.
• Source of the Report. This information should be obvious and easy to locate. Check below for more information on evaluating agency and organization Web sites.
• Transparency of Methods. It should be clear where data and other types of information came from, how it was analyzed and how the final report was compiled.
• Currency. The date a report was issued should be easy to find. If a report is older, try to find a more recent version or an update.

These can be some of the hardest forms of grey literature to locate. Where papers presented at an academic conference have been published as a book or as a special issue of a journal, these can be readily found in library catalogues. Conference papers can also be found on conference web sites. In addition, many databases include the option to limit your search to conference papers. Single Search allows "conference materials" as a limiter also

Far more difficult to locate are unpublished conference papers, or conference proceedings that have yet to be published in the form of printed proceedings. However, there are a number of databases which contain details (and occasionally the full-text or ordering information) for papers from academic conferences. These include:

• Agricola.
• Econpapers.
• ERIC.
• MEDLINE.
• PsycINFO.

Another useful source is Web of Conferences site.