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What is grey literature? |
Grey literature is information which has been published informally or non-commercially, or remains unpublished, including government or technical reports, policy documents, discussion papers, statistics, patents, conference proceedings, posters and infographics.
It is not usually peer-reviewed, but may still be good, reliable information.
Conference Proceedings | Newsletters |
Technical reports | Theses and dissertations |
Government reports | Research reports |
Patents | Maps |
Clinical trials and practice guidelines | Blogs |
Videos | Census data |
Informal communications | Pre and post print articles |
White papers | Working papers |
Why use grey literature? |
Grey literature can provide a richer source of current research across many disciplines, because industry, organisations and government bodies frequently produce reports faster than other publication types. So it can be important to explore grey literature, like theses or government reports, to see what research other people are producing in your field.
Finding Grey literature |
Some key links to grey literature for agriculture include:
Using Google to find Grey Literature |
There are ways to search Google more efficiently to find grey literature.
Use these shortcuts when searching Google or Google Scholar to get better results.
Search tool | How it works | Example |
"exact words" |
forces a search for a specific phrase only |
"climate change" |
-word | search will exclude this word | amazon -bookshop |
author: | search for an author of a journal article or book | author:Singh |
site: | limit to a type of site: .gov, .edu, .org | site:gov |
:au | search for websites within Australia | farming:au |
search terms + site:URL | search within a specific site |
cattle site:https://www.abc.net.au/news/rural |
intitle: | search for words in a webpage title | intitle:climate change |