Subject Resources for

Searching for Grey Literature

Introduction

 Grey literature is defined as ... "information produced on all levels of government, academia, business and industry in electronic and print formats not controlled by commercial publishing" ie. where publishing is not the primary activity of the producing body." (ICGL Luxembourg definition, 1997 - Expanded in New York, 2004). Grey (or gray) literature has historically been difficult to identify and obtain because a) much of the grey literature is unindexed or unpublished (often both), and b) it is often locked deep within the "hidden or invisible" web, and unsearchable. However, as grey literature gets simpler to find in an era of open access, its importance will increase. This guide is meant to provide some assistance to those in scholarly environments wishing to extend their research to this important literature. Start your search for GL by scanning/browsing relevant websites. Increasingly, institutional repositories (IRs) - such as the University of Toronto TSpace - place faculty publications freely-accessible online. Some materials are crawled by Google Scholar and/or Scirus. For systematic reviews of the literature, several search engines that crawl different portions of the Web should be searched as "one-stop searching" does not (yet) exist. Use the categories below to guide your searching although keep in mind they are not exhaustive. You should discuss search techniques with a subject librarian.

Select one of ten (10) categories:

Note

Last Updated

 6-Feb-2010
And don't forget to try: UBC Library Catalogue or Web/Internet Search Tools
Contact: Dean Giustini
Last Updated: 6-Feb-2010

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