LibGuides: Evidence synthesis: Grey literature sources

Grey Literature

"The term ‘grey literature’ is often used to refer to reports published outside of traditional commercial publishing. Review authors should generally search sources such as dissertations and conference abstracts" Cochrane Handbook v.6.3 - Part 2, section 4.3.5 Other sources.

Formats include:

Registered Controlled Trial Registers
Technical or research reports from government agencies
Reports from scientific research groups and organisations
Working papers from research groups or committees
Doctoral (PhD) dissertations
Some conference proceedings and official publications
Preprints (journal articles not yet peer-reviewed and/or published)

Links to Grey Literature

AgeInfo
An information service from the Centre for Policy on Ageing.
BASE
BASE is one of the world's most voluminous search engines especially for academic web resources. The index contains more than 400 million records from more than 11,000 content providers. You can access the full texts of about 60% of the indexed records for free (Open Access). BASE is operated by Bielefeld University Library.
CORE
CORE (COnnecting REpositories) provides a comprehensive bibliographic database of the world’s scholarly literature, collecting and indexing research from repositories and journals
British Library EThOS
E-Theses Online Service (EThOS) update. Please read section How do I find theses in the meantime?
Directory of open access preprint repositories
It is becoming an increasingly common practice for researchers to share their preprints because it allows them to disseminate their research results quickly and openly with the rest of the world. As a result, there is a growing number of preprint-specific and generalist repositories that support the sharing of preprints.

This directory provides a list of preprint repositories that are available to the research community. It helps researchers find the most appropriate platform for them, enabling them to browse through existing repositories by discipline, location, language, functionalities, and other facets.
The King's Fund Library Database
The King's Fund Database is the online catalogue for the Library Service of The King's Fund and is freely available for use by anyone looking for information in the areas we cover. (Includes the the records from the National Grey Literature Collection)
medRxiv
The Preprint Server for Health Sciences
OAIster
Contains digital resources from open archive collections
OpenAIRE
A comprehensive and open dataset of research information covering 171m publications, 60m research data, 385k research software items, from 129k data sources, linked to 3m grants and 198k organizations.
OpenDOAR
OpenDOAR is an authoritative directory of academic open access repositories.
OSF (Open Science Framework)
Social Care Online
The UK’s largest database of information and research on all aspects of social care and social work.

Trip Pro

Trip is a clinical search engine designed to allow users to quickly and easily find and use high-quality research evidence to support their practice and/or care.

For off-campus access Login with your University of Dundee username and password

U.S. Clinical Trials.gov
The US ClinicalTrials.gov registry of clinical trials also links to articles and other publications relating to a trial where known.
WHO International Clinical Trials Register
The Clinical Trials Search Portal provides access to a central database containing the trial registration data sets provided by various country registries. It also provides links to the full original records.