Library and Learning Centre
Te Whare Pukapuka Wāhanga Whakapakari Ako

Finding and using grey literature

What is grey literature?
graphics for grey literature

The term grey literature covers a broad range of material that is found outside the traditional commercial and academic publishing arena. It is produced non-commercially by places like government departments, agencies, NGOs, and businesses. It includes things like:

Reports
Working papers
Policy documents
Working papers
Plans
White papers
Standards
Conference proceedings
Theses and dissertations

Pros and cons of grey literature 
Pros and cons

Grey literature may provide you with excellent, up-to-date information in your research area. Advantages of using grey literature include:

Accessing a broad range of source types:
  • Including sources of raw data and statistics
  • Locating unpublished current information
  • Finding information that will not be published in academic journals

But there are some disadvantages to consider with grey literature:

  • Not usually peer reviewed
  • Accuracy or bias may be harder to determine
  • Can be hard to search for systematically
How and where to find grey literature 
searching

If you know which organisation produced a particular document, you can search their website but if you are looking for grey literature on a specific subject then here are some helpful tools:

Google:

You can find a great range of grey literature in Google. Here are a few tips to help find grey literature in the sea of other Google information:

Searching by filetype

Many reports are in PDF form. By entering your search terms followed by filetype:pdf you can limit the items you retrieve to PDF documents.

Here’s an example:

Picture of Google search that says health child zealand filetype:pdf


Searching by site

If there is a website you particularly like and would like to see if it has information on a particular subject, you can use Google to search the website.  For example if you like Scoop news website and want to see the articles on climate change, try the following:

Google search showing climate change site:scoop.co.nz

  Note: Climate change is enclosed in speechmarks so it is searched as a phrase.

You may also be interested in trying these websites and repositories of grey literature: