Health and Social Care: Grey Literature
This page aims to define what is grey literature and to give you sources and guidance about using grey literature in your research.
What is grey literature?
Grey literature can be defined as:
Any publication created outside recognised academic or commercial outlets and difficult to classify
(HEE, 2022)
or
Grey literature stands for manifold document types produced on all levels of government, academics, business and industry in print and electronic formats that are protected by intellectual property rights, of sufficient quality to be collected and preserved by library holdings or institutional repositories, but not controlled by commercial publishers i.e., where publishing is not the primary activity of the producing body.
(Joachim Schöpfel, Twelfth International Conference on Grey Literature, 2010)
Grey Literature sources
- MednarA complex federated search engine returning white and grey literature. View the About pages for instructions on how to use this most effectively
- World Wide ScienceWorldWideScience.org is a global science gateway-accelerating scientific discovery and progress through a multilateral partnership to enable federated searching of national and international scientific databases.
- MedRxivPreprint service for the Health sciences - not yet peer reviewed
- EU Grey literatureCedefop is the EUCedefop is one of the EU’s decentralised agencies. Cedefop supports development of European vocational education and training (VET) policies and contributes to their implementation.
This is a working paper from 2012 on all grey literature - not only health related. - Databases covering research outputs from the global southMultidisciplinary list of grey and white literature compiled by S. Dalton, University of Leeds.
- African Digital Research RepositoriesLists of repositories s and datasets from African countries. Open access resources and an interactive map
Systematic reviews
Articles about grey literature - especially its use in systematic reviews.
Open Access
Some grey literature is Open Access but not all Open Access resources are grey literature.
Some Open Access resources contain both grey and white literature.