Guides: Health Physics and Radiation Science: Grey Lit

What is Grey Literature?

Grey (or gray) literature is:

information produced on all levels of government, academics, business and industry
in electronic and print formats
not controlled by commercial publishing (meaning publishing is not the primary activity of the producing body)

It's called grey literature because it can be fuzzy, hard to define, and (in many cases) hard to locate.

Examples of grey literature include:

Theses and dissertations
Patents
Standards
Working papers
Pre-prints
White papers
Reports (institutional, annual/activity, technical, laboratory/research team)

Using grey literature will help strengthen your research. It can be more current than the literature found in books/journals and thus offer you a fuller picture of the information surrounding your topic. When you search for grey lit, expect to run many searches and click on many links.

Theses and Dissertations

OAIster
Search institutional repositories simultaneously to access free, hard to find, open access materials from 572 institutions.
Open Access Theses and Dissertations
Over 2.5 milion open access graduate theses and dissertations published around the world. Metadata (information about the theses) comes from over 1,000 colleges, universities, and research institutions. Allows for some basic data visualization capabilities.
eScholar @ Ontario Tech
A digital repository of Ontario Tech research that is provided by the Library. E-scholar collects, preserves, and showcases the academic work of the Ontario Tech community, including faculty publications and graduate theses and dissertations.

Proquest Dissertations and Theses (PQDT) This link opens in a new window
Currently includes over 2 million masters theses and dissertations from a variety of disciplines with 60,000 titles added annually - Citations only for 1861-1996; Fulltext from 1997 to the present.
Licence Summary:

Conference Proceedings

Compendex via. Engineering Village This link opens in a new window
Provides indexing to over 5,000 engineering journals, conferences and technical reports.
Licence Summary:
IEEE Xplore This link opens in a new window
Full text access to technical literature in electrical engineering, computer science, and electronics. Contains documents from IEEE journals, transactions, magazines, letters, conference proceedings, standards, and IEE (Institution of Electrical Engineers) publications. Not compatible with IE browsers.
Licence Summary:
CINAHL (Cumulative Index to Nursing & Allied Health Literature) Plus with Full Text This link opens in a new window
Comprehensive nursing and allied health research database providing indexing for more than 4,600 journals with 770 full text titles. Over 275 full text e-books and access to selected conference proceedings and standards of practice.
Licence Summary:

Pre-prints

E-Print Network
Full-text scientific and technical information created by scientists and research engineers. Also a gateway to over 35,300 websites and databases worldwide, containing over 5.5 million e-prints in basic and applied sciences, primarily in physics but also including subject areas such as chemistry, biology and life sciences, materials science, nuclear sciences and engineering.
arXiv.org
Access to over 1 million pre-prints in the areas of physics, mathematics, nonlinear sciences, computer science, and quantitative biology.

Government and Regulatory Websites

Science.gov
Gateway to over 50 million pages of authoritative selected science information provided by U.S. government agencies, including research and development results.
SciTech Connect
Science, technology, and engineering research information (including technical reports, datasets, citations, and multimedia) from the U.S. Department of Energy.
Radiation Safety Institute of Canada
Provides access to regulations and other documents of public interest.
Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission
The Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission regulates the use of nuclear energy and materials to protect health, safety, security and the environment, and to implement Canada's international commitments on the peaceful use of nuclear energy; and to disseminate objective scientific, technical and regulatory information to the public.
International Atomic Energy Agency
The IAEA is the world's centre for cooperation in the nuclear field. It was set up as the world's "Atoms for Peace" organization in 1957 within the United Nations family. The Agency works with its Member States and multiple partners worldwide to promote the safe, secure and peaceful use of nuclear technologies. The IAEA's scientific and technical publications include international safety standards, technical guides, conference proceedings and scientific reports. Publications of a more general interest include the IAEA Bulletin, factsheets and topical booklets. Many documents are available in pdf format.

Grey Literature Search Engines

OpenGrey
Open access resource with over 700,000 bibliographical references of grey literature (paper) produced in Europe in the areas of Science, Technology, Biomedical Science, Economics, Social Science and Humanities. Allows for the exportation of records and location of full text, research data, as well as post-publication data.
Google Scholar