Grey Literature resources
What is Grey Literature?
Grey literature is defined as ‘that which is produced on all levels of government, academics, business and industry in print and electronic formats, but which is not controlled by commercial publishers.’[1] Examples include technical reports from governmental, inter-governmental and non-governmental agencies or research groups, working papers from research groups or preprints, thesis/dissertations and conference papers. Here we list some of the most useful tools to find Grey Literature related to science:
OpenDOAR – www.opendoar.org
This resource is a directory of over 2600 academic open access repositories. The directory is run by the Centre for Research communications (CRC), University of Nottingham. Links to various resources are listed on the Country and Organizations access page. Also available is a Search Repository Contents page. These search results include links to the full-text documents.
Bielefeld Academic Search Engine (BASE) – www.base-search.net
BASE is a search engine primarily for academic open access web resources. A resource of over 2600 academic open access repositories, BASE is operated by Bielefeld University Library (Germany). Initial search results are organized by relevancy with tools to further refine searches. The search results citations include links to the full-text documents.
Open Grey – www.opengrey.eu
Open Grey, a consortium of numerous academic institutions in Europe, is a database of 700,000 grey literature references in Europe plus links to many full-text documents – technical or research reports, doctoral dissertations, conference papers and official publications. Search results are organized by author, organization, discipline, keyword, year and document type with access to the full-text documents.
WorldWideScience.org – worldwidescience.org
This is a global science gateway comprised of national and international scientific databases and portals that, for a keyword search, examines 99 sources. A multilateral partnership, the project was developed and is maintained by the Office of Scientific and Technical Information, Department of Energy (USA). Search results are organized into papers, multimedia and data sections. In the Topics section, one of the options is Full Text Articles. Note: search results for this gateway include links to commercially produced material that may be available from the various R4L program portals.
Please open these resources and decide which ones are most useful to your research needs.
[1] Grey Literature Report, New York Academy of Medicine, www.greylit.org/about (accessed 02 January 2015)
About the author
Lenny Rhine
Lenny Rhine
Since 2006, Lenny has been holding training workshops all over the world for the Research4Life programmes with financial support from various organizations, including WHO, ITOCA and in collaboration with the Librarians Without Borders®/Medical Library Association (LWB/MLA). Lenny has held training workshops all over the world, including sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, and South Pacific, as well as English speaking countries in the Americas and Eastern Europe.
