Slides for a short (1 hour 20 minute) workshop for graduate and post-graduate health science students and researchers on searching for grey literature.

1. Introduction to Grey Literature for Health Sciences
Franklin Sayre
franklin.sayre@ubc.ca
February 2014

2. Objectives:
By the end of this session you will be able to:
1. Define grey literature & explain why it’s important
2. Plan a reasonable grey literature search based on your topic
3. Identify some key databases
4. Search Google using advanced operators

3. Activity: brainstorming keywords (2 minute)
Write down:
1.The major concepts that make up your research topic
2.The keywords, phrases, and synonyms that could be used to
describe each concept

4. Grey Literature is Literature that isn’t in
the form of a book or a journal article
“Information produced on all levels of government,
academics, business and industry in electronic and print
formats not controlled by commercial publishing i.e.
where publishing is not the primary activity of the
producing body.”
Third International Conference on Grey Literature in 1997

5. What are some examples of Grey
Literature?
• Conference proceedings and abstracts
• Thesis and dissertations
• Reports & publications from governmental and nongovernmental organizations
• Technical reports and standards
• Social media, electronic and personal communications
• Statistics
• Etc.

6. Why is Grey Literature Important?
• Helps offset the bias of published results (drug trials, etc.)
• Helps introduce alternative perspectives
• Timeliness (delay between research & publication)
• Coverage of emerging research areas

7. Finding Grey Literature is Difficult
• Vast
• Not systematically organized or described like
books/journals
• Not systematically archived or preserved

8. How to Find Grey Literature
Narrowing your scope: things to think about
• Who are your stakeholders?
• Government? Non-Government? Academic?
• What
•
•
•
•
kinds of literature are you interested in?
Theses & Dissertations?
Conference Proceedings?
Reports?
Statistics?
• What time period is relevant?
• What geographical/geopolitical area is relevant?

9. Finding Stakeholder Organizations
• Directory of Health Organizations (NLM) Directory of
health organizations maintained by the National Library of
Medicine (NLM)
• Grey Literature Publishers List (The New York Academy of Medic
A very comprehensive list of organizations that produce
health-related grey literature.
• Grey Matters (CADTH) Checklist of national and
international HTA web sites, drug and device regulatory
agencies, clinical trial registries, etc.

10. How to Find Grey Literature
Where do you find grey literature:
• Specific databases
• Theses and dissertations, conference proceedings,
reports, statistics, etc.
• Institutional/Subject Repositories (e.g. UBC’s cIRcle)
• Theses and dissertations, reports, presentations,
conference proceedings, etc.
• Stakeholder websites (WHO, Gov. of Canada)
• Search engines (Google)
• Personal contacts
• Reference lists

11. How to Find Grey Literature
Conference Proceedings & Abstracts:
• PapersFirst / ProceedingsFirst
• Web of Science
• SciFinder
• EMBASE / CINAHL / MEDLINE
• & many more – see research guide
Dissertations and Theses:
• Proquest Dissertations and Thesis
• See: UBC Library’s Dissertations & Theses guide:
http://libguides.library.ubc.ca/theses?hs=a

12. Activity: Searching Web of Science of Conference
Proceedings and Abstracts

13. How to Find Grey Literature
Reports and other materials:
• Canadian Health Research Collection / Canadian Public
Policy Collection
• Opengrey (more European)
• Grey Literature Report (American focus)
• Google
• & many more – see research guide

14. Activity: Searching the Canadian Public
Policy Collection
Canadian Health Policy Collection
–Find via the UBC Library website by searching in the
“Indexes & Databases” tab
–Search using keywords and “quoted phrases”
–Also search the Canadian Public Policy Collection

15. Advanced Google for Grey Literature
“quotation marks” & verbatim mode
• “Quotation Marks”
• Force words to appear in a specific order
• Reduce the number of results
• E.G. “cell migration” vs. “human migration”
• Verbatim Mode
• Turns off synonyms, spell checking, & localization
for all search terms
• To use first conduct a search then select “Search
tools”  “All results”  “Verbatim”

16. Advanced Google for Grey Literature
Building complex searches Using OR and (brackets)
• AND is implicit – don’t need to add it between search
terms
• Use OR to include synonyms
• Always uppercase OR
• E.G. “global warming” OR “climate change”
• Use brackets to (group keywords together)
• E.G. (“global warming” OR “climate change”) (“food
security” OR “food independence”)

17. Advanced Google for Grey Literature
Searching using page structure
• Intitle/allintitle: Specifies that the keyword(s) are
located in the title
• Idea is that words in the title are more important
• Use carefully, doesn’t work with filetype: operator
• E.G. allintitle: diabetes mobile health
• Other operators to get at structure:
• intext/allintext: Looks in text of website
• Inurl/allinurl: looks in URL of website

18. Advanced Google for Grey Literature
Limiting results with site: and filetype:
• site: limits results to specific sites based on URLs
• E.G. site:ubc.ca
• E.G. site:gc.ca
• E.G. site:edu OR site:gov
• filetype: limits results to specific filetypes
• E.G. filetype:pdf
• E.G. filetype:xls
• E.G. site:pdf OR site:doc
• Do not use with site structure operators like intitle:

19. Advanced Google for Grey Literature
Removing erroneous results with exclude (-)
• -term removes results with that term
• E.G. Smithers –simpsons –homer
• E.G. migration cancer -cell
• Can also be used with the site: operator
• E.G. site:ca -site:gc.ca (Canadian sites but no
government of Canada sites)
• E.G. -site:nih.gov (removes pubmed results from
Google Scholar)

20. Advanced Google for Grey Literature
Adding flexibility with wildcards
• Wildcard Operator *
• E.G. “population and * health”
• * replaces 1-4 words or numbers
• Use with or without quotations

21. Further Information
Grey Literature for Health Research Guide:
http://libguides.library.ubc.ca/greylitforhealth
Health Statistics and Data Guide
http://libguides.library.ubc.ca/healthstats
Dissertations & Theses Guide:
http://libguides.library.ubc.ca/theses?hs=a
Power Searching with Google:
http://www.powersearchingwithgoogle.com/course/aps/skills