Library Guides: Life and Health Sciences Research Support: Grey Literature

What is Grey Literature?

Grey literature is material that is either unpublished or has been published in non-commercial form and as a result can be difficult to find.

On this guide you will find details and links to the a selection of commonly used types of grey literature for Life and Health Sciences disciplines.

Theses and Repositories

EThOS
600,000+ records of UK Doctoral theses. It allows download of an increasing number of electronic and digitised theses direct to the desktop.

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Please note - due to a cyber-attack on the British Library systems, EThOS is currently unavailable. However, the records indexed by EThOS are searchable via the USearch discovery tool even though full-text access is currently unavailable via the EthOS site.
Ulster University’s Research Portal
CORE
OpenDOAR

Guidelines and Official Publications

Social Media, Blogs and Discussion Lists

Useful Websites

This is not a comprehensive list, also check the websites of any professional organisations and charities in the topic area.

Clinical Trials

Centerwatch
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Searchable clinical trials site for professionals and patients
ClinicalTrials.gov
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ClinicalTrials.gov is a US based registry and results database of publicly and privately supported clinical studies of human participants conducted around the world.
EU Clinical Trials Register
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The EU Clinical Trials Register website allows you to search for information on clinical trials in European Union (EU) member states and the European Economic Area (EEA) and clinical trials which are conducted outside the EU/EEA if they form part of a paediatric investigation plan (PIP).
ISRCTN registry
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"The ISRCTN registry is a primary clinical trial registry recognised by WHO and ICMJE that accepts all clinical research studies (whether proposed, ongoing or completed), providing content validation and curation and the unique identification number necessary for publication. All study records in the database are freely accessible and searchable."
National Cancer Institute - clinical trials
AllTrials
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"AllTrials calls for all past and present clinical trials to be registered and their full methods and summary results reported."

Conferences and Conference Proceedings

Open Access and Preprints

Open Access provides scholarly work online with no charge to the reader. Consult the Library's Open Access Guide for more information.

A preprint is an early version of a scholarly paper which has been made publicly accessible online via a preprint server or a preprint publisher's platform before submission to a journal and peer review. More about preprints.