Public Health: Grey Literature

Grey literature is information produced outside of commercial publishing and distribution, including:

Grey (or gray) literature can be more current than traditional sources, but since it does not go through the peer-review process the quality may be variable and all sources must be critically evaluated. Researching grey sources can help identify a gap in the literature, and may offer a fuller picture and/or balance possible biases in commercial publications.

AHRQ Report: Finding Grey Literature 

Grey Literature Publishers List

Medline Plus Organization Directory: search individual organizations of interest for reports, conference proceedings, newsletters, guidelines, etc

NIH Health Services Research Projects in Progress

WHO: World Health Organization: reports and guidelines on public and global health topics

Tricks for finding unpublished material in Google and Google Scholar

• Use quotes around a phrase to force specific word order.
• Use quotes around a word to turn off synonyms, plurals, and spell-checking.
• Specify domains such as .org, .ca, or .gov.
• Search within a website or domain by adding site: in front of it.
• Specify file types .pdf, .ppt, .doc.
• Search social media: @twitter, #hashtags.
• Check variant spellings to find Canadian, British, and American English.

Note: advanced search techniques such as truncation, boolean operators, and nesting terms do NOT work in ordinary Google searching. Use Advanced Search to access more options.

NGO Search: non-governmental organizations

IGO Search: international government organizations

DataCite: locate datasets, program files, images, and other research material