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Planning: Grey Literature

How to search for and find information on planning

What is grey literature?

 

The term grey literature refers to quality literature that exists free on the web, including government documents and statistics, business reports, white papers and academic literature published in an open access format. 

Grey literature does not go through the same peer review process as journal articles but can still be a reliable resource for you to use, just make sure that you evaluate grey literature before using it.

Types of grey literature

 
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

How to find grey literature?

 

Grey literature can generally be found via Google or Google Scholar, through there are repositories of grey literature you can go and search directly as well. 

The boxes below witll give you some search tips as well as some places you can look.

Google advanced search

 

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:

  1. Type the keywords palliative care and volunteers into the search bar
  2. In site or domain, type in .gov.au (this limits results to only Australian Government sources)
  3. Under file type, choose PDF (most reports by governments and organisations are PDF)
  4. Then select search

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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:

  • .org for organisation sources
  • .edu for educational sources

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. 

UTS Collection - 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.