Search for Grey Literature

Grey literature can be located in government agencies websites, institutional and preprint repositories, university websites, library databases or search engines, e.g. Google Scholar.

Search strategies

1. Identify keywords and terminology.
2. Identifying organisations that have publications relating to research topic of your interest.  

For examples,

• government agencies
• assoications and societies, and professional organisations
• advocacy groups
• non-profit or private organisations, e.g. research centres 
1. Finding grey literature
• Databases and library catalogues searching
• Hand-searching - (or Handsearching or Hand Searching) involves a manual page-by-page examination of the entire contents of a journal issue or conference proceedings to identify all eligible reports.
• Snowballing - (Reference tracking - back in time, and Citration tracking- forward in time) Snowballing refers to using the reference list of a paper or the citations to the paper to identify additional papers.  Snowballing is also referred as ‘Pearl Growing’, ‘Bibliographic Search’ or ‘Citation Tracking’
• Personal communication (i.e. telephone, email, social media ... etc.)
• Googling (Google, Google Scholar,Yahoo, Bing ... etc)
• Search citations and indexs on the web (i.e. Web of Science, EndNote, ScienceDirect full text's content platform, Scopus)
• Blog searching
2. List databases that have been searched and when
• List websites and blogs browsed
• Record search terms, keywords, search stragies and limiters
• Record number of hits (search results) and compare hits in other databases.
• Documenting searches and search results on a checklist.
3. Import citations into a bibliographic mangement tool, e.g. EndNote, RefWorks

Include "site:gov.au" with your search terms to search within Australian government webpages only. Eg: site:gov.au elective surgery