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Public Health Research Guide

Library and online resources for Public Health research in general and for specific MUW courses

What is grey literature?

Technical definition: information produced on all levels of government, academics, business and industry in electronic and print formats not controlled by commercial publishing, i.e. where publishing is not the primary activity of the producing body -- from ICGL Luxembourg 1997; expanded in New York 2004

Practical definition: High-quality information created and shared outside the scholarly communications infrastructure of journals and traditional publishers; Reports, white papers, dissertations, conference papers, and data -- all things you won't find in PubMed!

Search engines for grey literature

Searching for grey literature on the web

Anyone can create a custom search targeted at a specific group of websites.

The technical side of creating a Google custom search is easy; you probably won't even need this documentation. The hard part is deciding which websites you want to include in your search.

NGOs, Government sites, and more