Finding grey literature

What is grey literature?

Grey literature is information produced by governments, industry, non-government organisations and community groups. It often comes in the form of briefing papers, government documents & reports, issues papers, discussion papers, white papers, policy papers, fact sheets, market reports & annual reports.

It has not gone through the process of peer review like scholarly literature, but is often rigorously researched, well referenced, and written by experts in the subject area.

How do you know it's suitable?

Like any resource you are using for your assessment, grey literature needs to be evaluated based on a number of considerations:

• Its reliability, is the author an authority or expert on the issue, can you verify their credentials?
• Its validity and accuracy, good research is well referenced, that goes for grey literature as well, if there are no links or references to other sources, how can you be sure it's valid?
• Its currency, is it up to date, if there's no date on the resource it could be old and out of date?
• Its publisher, is it a suitable source of information - government departments and well known organisations are suitable, but be careful if the research appears to be biased or unfounded. An advocacy group, for example may have a point of view they wish to get across.
• What is the purpose of the resource, to entertain, inform, educate, persuade? Or sell an idea? How objective is it?

Where do you find grey literature?

Grey literature is rarely found in academic libraries, it is mostly published on websites, and can be easily found during a Google search. 

We also have two databases in which specialise in grey literature and policy resources. See previous module for information on searching the APO & Overton databases.

Where you search is key to finding what you are looking for so try a Google Advanced search using a government or organisation domain to filter your results like this: