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Writing a Literature Review: For Researchers: Grey Literature

Kia ora! This is a guide for writing literature reviews for researchers. This guide provides quick links to resources and help, to support your research.

Grey literature are materials and research produced by organizations outside of the traditional commercial or academic publishing and distribution channels.

Grey literature stands for manifold document types produced on all levels of government, academics, business and industry in print and electronic formats that are protected by intellectual property rights, of sufficient quality to be collected and preserved by libraries and institutional repositories, but not controlled by commercial publishers; i.e. where publishing is not the primary activity of the producing body.

Examples of grey literature in the Health field for instance, include:

  • Conference abstracts; 
  • Presentations; 
  • Proceedings;
  • Regulatory data;
  • Unpublished trial data;
  • Government publications;
  • Reports (such as white papers, working papers, internal documentation);
  • Dissertations/theses;
  • Patents;
  • Policies & procedures
  • Open Access Repositories are useful for Grey Literature.
  • Find the Government Department you think will help. Click on the link, and as the next page, choose website from the list under Contact. Then you can use the search box to search for your topic.