The term grey literature refers to published and unpublished research, such as reports, government documents, and presentations which you can find simply through Google!
Grey literature is often the best source of up-to-date research as you don’t have to wait for it to go through the publication process. Grey literature usually is not found on the library website or in databases.
Grey literature does not go through the same peer-review process as journal articles. However, it can still be a reliable resource for you to use. Just make sure that you evaluate grey literature before using it.
Government Documents | Newsletters | Data sets |
Theses and Dissertations | Conference proceedings | Lectures |
Blogs and Social Media | Videos | Research proposals |
Company/Industry reports | Policy statements | Emails |
Geological and Geophysical surveys | Fact sheets | Patents and Standards |
Grey literature can be tricky to find. To save time and search effectively, we recommended you plan your search.
Steps:
Google's Advanced Search makes it easy to find grey literature.
For example, we want to find Australian government reports on volunteers in the palliative care sector
Steps:
TIP: If you don't find what you want in Google try another option such as specialised databases.
Additional Google Searching Tips
In the site or domain field, you can also narrow your results to:
By putting .au after the site or domain (e.g. .edu.au) your search will only return Australian educational sources.
In the UTS Library Catalogue you can narrow your search results to grey literature sources (such as dissertations, patents, etc.) by using the refining tool on the left under Resource Type.
The Library subscribes to many databases which contain different types of grey literature. In the UTS Library Collection, and most databases, you can limit your search to grey literature by refining your search by ‘publication’, ‘source type’, or ‘document type’.
Suggested grey literature databases:
Specialised sources, such as Open Grey, BASE, or PANDORA: Australian Web Archive, list grey literature in a number of subject areas.
Trove is an overarching search interface to search the content of most Australian libraries as well as archives and repositories.
Institutional repositories, such as OPUS at UTS, hold digital theses written by PhD, Masters and Honours students at UTS. You can find links to all the other Australian University repositories via the Australasian Open Access Repositories.
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