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VIC121 Evaluating Healthcare: Problems and Solutions


Grey Literature

Definition

An important category of information sources in the health sciences is called grey literature. Specifically, grey literature refers to a variety of document types “produced on all levels of government, academics, business and industry in print and electronic formats, but which is not controlled by commercial publishers, i.e., where publishing is not the primary activity of the producing body.

—Sixth International Conference on Grey Literature, 2004

How to Find Grey Literature

Grey literature can be more difficult to locate than the scholarly literature indexed in the major databases. However, for conference papers, some subscription databases allow you to select the “Conference Papers” as a document type to limit your search results.

Here are just a few links where you can find grey literature in the health sciences:

Canadian Agency for Drugs and Technologies in Health (CADTH)

Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI)

OpenGrey
A database of European grey literature.

created by: Colin Deinhardt | updated: 18 September 2020