Grey Literature is not academic/scholarly piece of writing. It includes government documents, foundation reports, white papers, working papers, issue briefs, organizational (versus academic) research, and other kinds of policy reports. It can be challenging to distinguish grey literature from academic sources, and often enough scholars are authors of this grey literature, blurring the lines all the more. An important distinction between grey literature and academic publications are that the latter are peer reviewed by scholars with expertise in the field.
Searching for Grey Literature:
- You may find references to this kind of literature in bibliographies of articles and books (e.g., citation chasing).
- You can often find it by means of a Google search, experimenting with different key words and adding genres such as “foundation report," "issue brief," "policy report," "funding report,” “working paper,” “study,” or “white paper.”
- Some other possible sources you may want to investigate
- The World Bank has two open access repositories. Documents and Reports and Open Knowledge Repository
- Documents and Reports contains final and official documents and reports from 1946 through the present
- Open Knowledge Repository is World Bank's official open access repository for all of its research and "knowledge products"
- Pew Research Center is a "a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world"
- OECD iLibrary is OECD's Online Library for Books, Papers and Statistics and the gateway to OECD's analysis and data.
- United Nations -- Penn Libraries subscribes to the UN iLibrary. You can also search the UN site directly.
- PhilSci Archive -- Preprint server for the philosophy of science sponsored by the Philosophy of Science Association and the University of Pittsburgh's Center for Philosophy of Science.
- Agricultural & Environmental Science Database -- Full-text database for the scholarly, professional, and policy literature on agriculture and the environment. It titles from around the world, including scholarly journals, trade and industry journals, magazines, technical reports, conference proceedings, and government publications.
- GreenFILE -- Offers well-researched information covering all aspects of human impact to the environment. Its collection of scholarly, government and general-interest titles includes content on the environmental effects of individuals, corporations and local/national governments, and what can be done at each level to minimize these effects.
Some social science databases will index this material and it may appear in government or organizational websites or through other means rather than formal publication. The creators of these documents may be teams or individuals, and the authors are not always listed.
Unlike academic articles, grey literature doesn't necessarily go through a vetting or peer review process. As such, when using this material, you will want to have an understanding of the organizational body sponsoring the work. Who funds them? What is their mission? Are they a lobbying or political group? What kinds of information do they publish? Do other organizations cite them? Who and for what reasons? Google Scholar is a great way to find out who is citing a particular publication.
