Grey Literature

In Health Studies, grey literature Includes conference proceedings; dissertations and theses; government agencies; association websites; ongoing or unpublished clinical trial data; reports and publications. It is produced by all levels of government, academia, NGOs, associations and professional organizations.

For comprehensive searching in the Health Studies, particularly when conducting a systematic review, scoping review or other review syntheses, it is important to search grey literature to:

• avoid bias
• supplement your research
• ensure that the review is as thorough as possible
• discover current or emergent research
• find the voices of the population or community group being studied
• identify programmes, interventions
• find detailed information on programmes, policies, local initiatives
• gather statistics as evidence, particularly community-based statistics
• discover additional references to published literature that your database search might have missed

The sources you select will be informed by your research question. Not all research questions require the use of grey literature.

Some examples of grey literature include:

Canadian

• Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI)
• Health Canada
• National Collaborating Centre for Indigenous Health 

International

• World Health Organization (WHO)
• National Institutes of Health
• The World Bank: Health 

Statistics

• Health Canada – Clinical Trials Database
• Statistics Canada: Health; Health Indicators; Health Reports

Other 

• KFL&A Report: The Cost of Healthy Eating

Below are some ways in which you can find grey literature resources for health studies:

• Conference Proceedings: Web of Science; Embase; Medline; Scopus
• Theses and Dissertations: Finding Theses and Dissertations; Omni
• Government Documents: Government Information (Health); Custom Google Search; Omni
• Non-government organizations: Policy Commons
• Targeted Website Browsing/Search (i.e., one website at a time) of identified authorities or stakeholders on your subject: Google

The following resources can be searched to identify grey literature. 

• Grey Matters: CADTH's Grey Matters resource is a free online tool for finding health-related grey literature that are not published commercially and which may be inaccessible via bibliographic databases.
• OpenGrey

Contact known researchers in the field to determine if there are any ongoing or unpublished studies.