Health Care Assistant

Grey Literature is information published outside the usual streams of academic publishing, but may still contain valuable, high quality information.

Examples include reports, research or working papers from:

• professional associations
• non-profit organizations
• non-partisan private associations
• regulatory agencies or governing bodies
• academic or research institutions or repositories

In addition to traditional report/research articles, you can also find thesis and dissertations, audits, standards, regulations, professional guidelines and benchmarks, summaries of clinical trials or other research, surveys, policy & procedure documentation and conference proceedings.

Often the best approach to finding this grey literature is using Google's Advanced Search interface.

Think about who might be interested in gathering information on your particular topic, and what words may appear in their websites or documentation.

Some Advanced Google Search suggestions:

• add the word association to your search terms to find professional or non-for-profit organizations involved in your area of interest
• if you are looking for reports, try limiting your search to .pdf file format, which is the most common format used for uploading documents
• limit your search to a particular url domain (eg. limiting to .gc.ca websites will limit search results to Canadian federal government websites; .edu will limit results to American university & college websites; .org will limit search results to non-profit organizations, etc.)

Not finding what you need?   

From our Ask Us page you can:

• Visit the one of the Library's Research Help desks in person
• Email a Librarian
• Text a Librarian
• Chat Live with a Librarian
• Book a virtual or in-person appointment with a subject specialist librarian (like me! :-) 
• Phone the Library

Library employees are monitoring the queues above and will respond to you as soon as possible.

Go to the Ask Us page