It's important to integrate information from grey literature into your scholarly research, because there is useful information outside the limits of peer-reviewed journal articles. But it can be hard to find, appraise, and manage grey literature. Use this webpage for advice, but remember that grey literature is diverse. Public health librarian Kate Nyhan is happy to consult with you about a grey literature search strategy tailored to your project.
Researchers: "I wish I could do a Google search, but just for the sites I care about, not for the whole web."
Librarians: "Good news! Anyone can create a custom search targeted at a specific group of websites."
The technical side of creating a Google custom search is easy; you probably won't even need this documentation. The hard part is deciding which websites you want to include in your search. We can talk about your specific research goal.
When you're reading papers, you'll probably see references to some grey literature databases that were valuable and popular, but are no longer updated. In some cases, you can still search them, as long as you're aware that you can't expect to find recent documents. In other cases, the database is no longer available at all.
information produced on all levels of government, academics, business and industry in electronic and print formats not controlled by commercial publishing, i.e. where publishing is not the primary activity of the producing body -- from ICGL Luxembourg 1997; expanded in New York 2004
High-quality information created and shared outside the scholarly communications infrastructure of journals and traditional publishers
Reports, white papers, dissertations, conference papers, and data -- all things you won't find in PubMed!