Here are listed some general sources of grey literature. Some focus on the health sciences, while others are more general in scope.
Papers presented at academic conferences can be found in a variety of places. Sometimes they are collected and published in book form or in academic journals - often in supplements, which can then be found through many of the databases that you use to locate regular journal articles like PubMed or Scopus.
In some databases, you can limit your search to these types of publications. So, you could run a search on a general subject area, like cancer, and limit the publication type to retrieve only conference proceedings. These documents are referred to in different ways, including congresses, meeting papers, and conference proceedings. You can also use keywords such as "proceedings" or "abstracts" to search along with your other search terms.
Remember that often the terms you search with in databases will need to relate to the conference as a whole, rather than to specific abstracts or topics that interest you.
More often than not, conference proceedings will be more difficult to locate than this. Another strategy is to identify the organizations that hold these conferences and check their Web sites for information on them. Many do make their proceedings and other information from conferences available For example, the American Society of Clinical Oncology site provides access to past meeting abstracts.
Grey literature may also be found in institutional repositories. These institutions often collect grey literature produced by their researchers. The following sites provide access to such repositories world-wide.
Clinical trial registries are helpful for locating trials that haven't been published elsewhere. You can also locate results, protocols and contact information in these registries.
If you are interested in a specific drug or device, it is good practice to also check drug or manufacturer websites as well for anything that might be otherwise missed.
Clinical Practice Guidelines (CPGs) can be found both in the journal and grey literatures. Some databases, such as PubMed, allow you to search for or filter a search to just guidelines. You can also locate CPGs using more general sites for health-related information, such as the TRIP Database (listed under General Sources). Other sources for practice guidelines and related tools such as care pathways, care bundles, order sets and protocols are listed below.
Professional medical organizations will often publish CPGs specific to their specialty on their websites. If you are searching for guidelines related to diabetes diagnosis or treatment, for example, you may want to check a site such as the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists. They link to 'Clinical Practice Guidelines' under the general 'Publications' area of their site.
These resources, FDA and otherwise, can provide regulatory, safety and cost information on prescription and OTC drugs and medical devices.
The following databases include various types of grey literature along with publisher-controlled literature. If you are interested in searching only for grey literature, consider restricting the "publication type" in your search. These types can include: technical report, dissertation, patent, meeting paper, annual report or government publication, among others.
A really thorough search for grey literature will include a general search of the Web via search engines to ensure you haven't missed anything important. Google is a popular search engine, but you should try others such as Yahoo and Bing to be comprehensive. What appears at the top of search results don't always overlap a great deal between the different search engines.
Consider restricting your search to the .org and/or .gov domains. You can also limit your search to pdf documents (the format many of these reports are stored in).
Let's say you are looking for documents on mobile telemedicine initiatives in Botswana. Your search strategy may look like either of these:
You may want to try both versions in the Google search box below (note that you'll see more about the type of documents and organizations that are returned if you follow the link to Google.com at the end of the search results.)
Searching on the Web means that you will want to take extra care when evaluating these resources.