What is Grey Literature?Grey Literature refers to "hard to find" material that is not published and distributed through traditional means. Don't overlook grey literature when conducting your research - it can be a rich source of local data and background information. It can include theses and dissertations, reports, unpublished research, conference presentations, standards, recommendations and raw datasets. |
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The term Working Paper or technical report is used to define material which is at pre-publication stage, preliminary research or theory, or technical data. It is also used to describe financial statements in an audit context.
Below are some institutional sources of Working Papers.
Local, regional, national and international government departments produce a huge variety of qualitative and quantitative data, from internal reports and position statements to statistics and annual reports.
Is there a historical aspect to your research?
Our Special Collections and Rare Books Guide might be of help.
Database sources of historical material
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Theses and dissertations are a rich source of research material and many are available online in full-text.
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The British Library's EThOS service is currently unavailable because of a serious cyber attack in August 2023.
The British Library's online service for Doctoral theses. It contains 480,000 theses - including Ulster University Doctoral theses from 2013 onwards.
Please note that British Library Online registration is required to download full-text theses.
Selected Doctoral theses are held in print format on each campus. To discover them, do a subject search on the Catalogue and refine your results by theses. Ask at the Library Information Point for help with retrieval.
Many of the Library's scholarly databases offer an option to limit search results to Dissertations and Theses or have a Dissertations section.
ProQuest Dissertations &Theses
Business Source Ultimate - On the database landing page, select Dissertation under Publication Type before clicking Search
Open Access sources of research
Universities, colleges and other research organisations are increasingly making their research output available free of charge (Open Access) through their institutional repositories and other aggregator services. Look out for the Open Access padlock which indicates an institution has actively signed up to the scheme.
Remember to always reference correctly (using Ulster Harvard Guidelines) any material that you use from another's research.