Gray Literature
Gray literature is an information source that is, often, not readily available via traditional publishing methods. For instance, abstracts of conference proceedings, where papers are presented to a live audience but the papers themselves may not be formally published in the academic literature.
Gray literature sources at the National Library of Medicine.
Examples of Traditional Gray Literature include:
- Completed clinical trials
- Dissertations
- Conference Proceedings
- OCLC/ProccedingsFirst -- (192,000+ records, 1993 - Present -- conference proceedings, meetings, congresses, symposia, exhibitions, workshops.)
- Scopus -- (Over 8 million conference proceedings from nearly 100,000 conferences.)
- Web of Science -- (The Conference Proceedings Citation Index contains over 227,000 conference proceedings, with 70 million cited references dating back from 1990 to present.)
- Posters/papers
- Governmental reports
- International, National, Local
- Guidelines and position papers
- Preprints
- Reports
- Statistical data
- More at:
Potential New Sources for Gray Literature:
- Google Scholar
- Blogs
- Toolkits
- PowerPoint presentations
- Pamphlets/factsheets
- Tweets
*Source: Bonato, Sarah, MIS. "Going Grey with Google Scholar for Systematic Reviews MLA Webinar," November 17, 2021.
