Using grey literature in your research: A short guide

As you research and write your thesis, you might come across, or be looking for, ‘grey literature’. This is quite simply material that is either unpublished, or published but not in a commercial form.

Types of grey literature include:

• Conference proceedings
• Government reports and briefings
• Policy documents
• Theses and dissertations
• Internal reports, research and data produced by companies and organisations
• Discussion papers, Working papers
• Standards, patents, technical specifications
• Statistical resources
• Fact sheets
• Maps
• Newsletters
• Blogs

Why should I use it?

• Grey literature is considered less biased than traditional published literature
  • It is free from commercial pressures, includes a broader range of research, is disseminated more quickly, offers diverse perspectives, avoids selective publication bias, and is often more relevant to policy and practice.
• You might find new evidence – for example, conferences are where researchers share insights and new findings.
• It may be more current, especially in under-researched areas.
• You might discover new references to published literature that your searches may have missed.
• Including grey literature makes your review more thorough.
• Some formats are an excellent source of raw data (e.g. statistics)

Where will I find it?

Overton is a database which includes grey literature from leading global universities, research funders, NGOs, publishers, and think tanks, as well as government reports and legislation. Overton is particularly helpful for searching literature from regions of the world which are under-represented in many of our databases.

Links to Cranfield’s past theses and research output, as well as theses from around the world can be found on the Theses page on our website.

You can also find UK government reports online.

Conference proceedings and papers can be found using our databases, such as SSRN, IEEE, Scopus and Web of Science. Google Scholar will also find conference papers and proceedings.

You can search Google with the site: command to search only articles from specific organisations. For example site: gov.uk “climate change” will return articles from UK government websites that mention “climate change”.

Trade publications will be specific to the industry you are researching but can be a good source of information, such as SKYbrary for aviation safety reports and documents.

Bear in mind… grey literature can provide useful evidence for your thesis, but is not of the same standard as published, peer-reviewed work. You must always evaluate your sources. Read more here on evaluating your sources.

If you have any questions about research sources of any kind, please email us. 

Feature image from Pixabay