WRTG 266 Writing for Social Change (O'Donnell): Finding Grey Literature

The open web provides a plethora of resources for finding information about and from governmental and non-govermental organizations working to address issues surrounding your topic of research as well as grey literature.

What is grey literature?
Information published by entities (researchers or those working in the field) whose main purpose is NOT publishing (e.g. government and non-government organizations, think tanks, scholarly societies and associations, etc​. Grey literature might be technical documentation, white papers, working papers, symposia, bulletins, unpublished works, technical reports, fact sheets, standards, patents and the like. Watch this video for more info.)

Why is grey literature important?
A large amount of public policy information is published as grey literature.                             

Below are a few advanced Google searching tips for find grey literature:  

1. Try using Google Advanced Search
2. Google ignores the word AND as a search operator. But, typing OR in all caps will find similar or related terms [e.g. "racial segregation" OR "modern segregation" OR "concentrated poverty"].
3. Include search terms like report OR analysis OR summary OR overview OR data
4. Search for a particular document type [e.g. denver (hispanic OR latino) population filetype:xls].
5. Search at particular site [e.g. site:.rochester.edu OR site:cityofrochester.gov OR site:census.gov OR pewresearch.org].
6. Search a particular domain [e.g.  site:.gov OR  site:.org  OR site:.uk  See a full list of country code domains].
7. Exclude words by using the "-" sign in front of the word you wish to exclude [e.g. denver (hispanic OR latino) -migrants].
8. Limit to a particular date range using before:YYYY-MM-DD or after:YYYY-MM-DD [e.g. metoo (Dobbs OR abortion) site:twitter.com after:2022-06-24 before:2022-06-30]

 Image source: Kamei, F. et al., (2020) under a CC BY 4.0 license