SW 450-550 Research & Evaluation: Grey Literature
Grey Literature in Social Work
A portion of the literature that you will find in Social Work is made up of reports, white papers, and more. These materials are referred to as grey literature because they are not commercially published. Rather, this literature is published by non-profits, research agencies, governments, etc. It can be helpful to supplement your searches by looking at institutional and agency web sites, and by searching databases containing citations to working papers.
Grey Literature Resources
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OpenGreyContains information on grey literature produced in Europe. Covers science, technology, biomedical science, economics, social science and the humanities.
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Social Sciences Research Network (SSRN)Features academic networks for many disciplines in the social sciences. Includes a database with abstracts of scholarly working papers and forthcoming papers. Also includes a paper collection of full-text documents.
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SIRENSIREN stands for Social Interventions Research & Evaluation Network and is a creation of UCSF. "This Evidence Library contains research articles, issue briefs, reports, and commentaries that either focus on or are relevant to evaluating health care-based interventions that address patients’ social and economic needs. We prioritize for inclusion resources that carefully describe and evaluate the social needs components of these interventions, and to a lesser extent those where the social components are mentioned but are not the primary focus of the work. The library currently includes only papers published since the year 2000."
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IssueLabContains free access to case studies, evaluations, white papers, annual reports, issue briefs, and numerous other materials addressing the world's social problems that include aging, crime and safety, government reports, nonprofit and philanthropy, race and ethnicity, and transportation.
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Bielefeld Academic Search Engine (BASE)BASE is one of the world's most voluminous search engines especially for academic open access web resources. BASE is operated by Bielefeld University Library.
What is Grey Literature?
Watch this two-minute video for a brief introduction to grey literature from Western University.