What is 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
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- Locating unpublished current information
- Finding information that will not be published in academic journals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
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:
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:
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:
- Archives New Zealand – official records from NZ government and public institutions
- Greynet International - a grey literature network service
- Grey Matter newsletter - compiled by the Ministry of Health Library and provides access to health related grey literature
- NZ Research – a comprehensive selection of research papers and related resources
- Global Health Observatory providing data and reports from WHO programmes
- New Zealand Parliament – publications include Bills, Hansard, Research papers and more
- Open DOAR – Directory of academic open access repositories
- Standards - For NZS and AS/NZS standards
- The Hub - a New Zealand repository for social science research
- World Bank – for global development data