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Grey literature

"Grey literature is information produced outside of traditional publishing and distribution channels, and can include reports, policy literature, working papers, newsletters, government documents, speeches, white papers, urban plans, and so on.

This information is often produced by organizations "on the ground" (such as government and inter-governmental agencies, non-governmental organisations, and industry) to store information and report on activities, either for their own use or wider sharing and distribution, and without the delays and restrictions of commercial and academic publishing. For that reason, grey literature can be more current than literature in scholarly journals." ~ Simon Fraser University Library

Grey literature can include but is not limited to

  • Technical and research reports
  • Masters Thesis and PhD dissertations
  • Conference papers and presentations
  • Documents in institutional repositories
  • Committee reports and minutes
  • Government data, documents and publications
  • Pre-print research papers
  • White papers
  • Blogs
  • Newsletters and mailing lists
  • Podcasts or video-logs (vlogs)

Finding grey literature

You can limit your Google results by domain by using the "site:" function

site:gc.ca - Government of Canada

site:ca - Web pages from Canada

site:edu - US educational institutions

site:gov - US Government web pages

site:org - Not-for-profit web pages