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  2. Research Guides

Grey Literature

Start your grey literature search with this guide containing resources and strategies for discovering research produced outside traditional commercial or academic publishing channels.

Incorporate & Cite

There are many ways to incorporate grey literature into your work, which is not much different from incorporating scholarly works. However, there are some key differences to remember when using grey literature. 

Evaluate and Verify

It is worth repeating that grey literature is not peer-reviewed like scholarly works, so evaluating and verifying grey literature before using it is extremely important. Use this guide's "Evaluating Grey Literature" page to see how this process works! 

Citing

Firstly, make sure that you are citing your sources properly! See the APA Citation Style guide link below to help with any challenges.

As with scholarly works, it is essential to clearly and correctly cite grey literature. However, with grey literature, it would behoove both you as a scholar and those reading your work to give more context for the grey literature to make it clear that the works you are citing could potentially be biased or inaccurate in ways scholarly works are not. 

For example, do you see a difference between the following two in-text citations?

"A 2019 report from Amnesty International states that the Chinese government is committing cultural genocide against Ughegrs. Human Rights Watch's 2020 report corroborates this and the reporting of the New York Times."  

"China is committing genocide against Muslims (Amnesty International 2019)."

The first citation is very clear in giving context, specificity, and verification for the grey literature, which will be extremely helpful to future researchers and make the paper's statements more accurate.