ACAP Learning Resources: ACAP Pathfinder: Psychological Science: Grey Literature: Policies, Reports, Papers

What is Grey Literature

Grey literature describes both unpublished or published documents, which are not controlled by commercial publishers. These sources include: Government and non-government reports, policy statements and papers; conference proceedings and theses; news sources and bulletins; and technical reports and standards. This information may be used as supporting material to your primary resources, such as research and theoretical literature. Grey Literature can be accessed by conducting a Google search or directly from relevant government, organisational and institutional websites.

Recommended Websites

Australian Bureau of Statistics
The ABS is Australia’s national statistical agency, providing trusted official statistics on a wide range of economic, social, population and environmental matters of importance to Australia.
Australian Indigenous Healthinfonet
The Australian Indigenous HealthInfoNet makes comprehensive, up-to-date information accessible to people interested in the health of Indigenous Australians.
Australian Institute of Health and Welfare
Authoritative and accessible information and statistics to inform and support better policy and service delivery decisions, leading to better health and wellbeing for all Australians.
Australian Institute of Family Studies
The Australian Government's key research body in the area of family wellbeing, conducting research to increase the understanding of Australian families and the issues that affect them
Australian Clinical Practice Guidelines
Australian Clinical Practice Guidelines The Clinical Practice Guidelines Portal provides access to clinical practice guidelines produced for Australian practice that have been assessed against selection criteria modified from the United States' National Guidelines Clearinghouse and adapted to the Australian context.
Analysis and Policy Observatory
A research database and alert service providing free access to full text research reports and papers, statistics and other resources essential for public policy development and implementation in Australia and New Zealand.
Healthdirect Australia
Healthdirect provides a range of free health services on behalf of the governments of Australia.
Research Data Australia
Find, access, and re-use data for research - from over one hundred Australian research organisations, government agencies, and cultural institutions.

Cochrane Library Online
The Cochrane Library (ISSN 1465-1858) is a collection of six databases that contain different types of high-quality, independent evidence to inform healthcare decision-making, and a seventh database that provides information about Cochrane groups.
Dissertation Express
Find dissertations and theses via Dissertation Express. Full text documents can be ordered through the library's interlibrary loan service: http://libguides.navitas.com/ill
GovPubs (Australia)
GovPubs: the Australian Government Publications Guide is a guide to selected types of Australian government publications, such as Acts, Hansards, Gazettes and Parliamentary Papers, located in Australia's National, State and Territory libraries or available on the Internet.
JADE
Staying up to date with the latest decisions of Australian and International Courts and Tribunals and Australian legislation has never been easier. New, revised, updated and so much more sophisticated, JADE takes online legal research to a whole new level.
PACFA & PACJA (Journal)
The Psychotherapy and Counselling Federation of Australia Inc. is a peak body for Member Associations which meet the standards developed by consensus as appropriate for professional practitioners within the disciplines of Counselling and Psychotherapy in the Australian community.
PDQT Open
With PQDT Open, you can read the full text of open access dissertations and theses free of charge.
PubMed
PubMed comprises more than 26 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books. Citations may include links to full-text content from PubMed Central and publisher web sites.
Social Policy Research Centre
The Social Policy Research Centre is a research centre of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of New South Wales. The SPRC conducts research and fosters discussion on all aspects of social policy in Australia.
SSRN (Social Science Research Network)
SSRN´s eLibrary provides research papers from hundreds of thousands of researchers across 30 disciplines.
The University of Adelaide, University Library: Psychiatric Rating Scales and Diagnostic Aids
A comprehensive listing of tests and measures used in the psychology field, compiled by the University of Adelaide Library.

Open Grey
System for Information on Grey Literature in Europe, is your open access to 700.000 bibliographical references of grey literature (paper) produced in Europe and allows you to export records and locate the documents.
Eldis
Sharing the best in global development research for policy and practice.
Access the latest editorially selected research. Share your work with development practitioners in over 180 countries.
Grey Literature Report
The report is a publication produced by the The New York Academy of Medicine between 1999 - 2016, alerting readers to new grey literature publications in health services research and selected urban health topics.
As of January 2017, the Grey Literature Report website and database will be discontinued and will no longer be updated, but the resources will still be accessible.
Grey Literature resources are cataloged and indexed using MeSH. The database allows full text keyword searching as well as subject searching and serves as an archive for the Reports.

Types of Resources

Description

News items are published at regular intervals and provide new information about various topics of interest to the general public. Magazines are also produced regularly and may focus on a particular subject area or cover a range of topics, again for consumption by the general public. The information within news publications and magazines are not in themselves scholarly works but may refer to academic sources. These sources can be found by searching MultiSearch or A-Z Databases

Purpose

To access recent or new information about current affairs, social, economic or political issues which provide an overview or introduction in digestible and readable packages. While not scholarly information, these resources may be required for use in particular assessment tasks or point towards recent research in a particular field.

Examples

Relevant Links

Search for news on Google

Description

A website is a set of related and interlinked pages which are hosted on the World Wide Web (WWW). A webpage refers to the individual pages contained within these sites. To search the WWW, download an internet browser (we recommend Google Chrome) and use a search engine such as Google to find content.

Purpose

The websites of particular institutions and government departments may be useful for your assessment tasks. You might also want to look at scholarly sites, such as Google Scholar, Researchgate, State Libraries, academic publishers and journal indexing services, to find the most scholarly information on the Web. Links recommended by the library can be found on the Useful Websites page.

Examples

Description

Conference papers are presented at conferences which are usually themed around a specific subject area or set of related topics and presented as a collection of proceedings. Some papers may be peer-reviewed and are searchable from MultiSearch, within journal databases, Dissertation Express or via Libraries Australia Trove database. A thesis or dissertation involves personal research, written by a candidate for an advanced university degree. Theses are also searchable from MultiSearch, Trove, or within individual academic institutional repositories and indexing databases such as PQDT Open, NDLTD, CORE and DART.

Purpose

Conference proceedings and theses can provide you with an in-depth look at some of the latest research on specific aspects of a topic.

Examples

Relevant Links

http://libguides.navitas.com/ill

Description

Legal resources include documents such as, but not limited to Bills, Acts, regulations, statutory laws, by-laws, proceedings of Parliament, legal cases and tribunal decisions. Some of these resources may be found by searching MultiSearch, in databases such as AustLII or JADE or within legislative sites for individual states and territories. You will also find cases and tribunal decisions on the websites of regulatory authorities such as AHPRA.

Purpose

Use these information sources when you need to refer to current laws, records, cases and decisions in your assessment tasks.

Examples

AustLII Cases & Legislation

Relevant Links

Library Resources for Criminology & Justice: Law & Legislation

Description

Government policies, reports, gazettes, media releases and parliamentary publications such as Hansards, are available from various websites here in Australia. You can also search Google to find individual publications. MultiSearch and journal databases will include some government papers and reports in search results. However, you should also directly consult federal and state departments and agencies, Libraries Australia GovPubs, the Analysis and Policy Observatory and State and Federal Parliamentary libraries.

Purpose

Use these sources in your assessment tasks to access up-to-date and authoritative information on subject areas which may be affected by Federal or State government.

Examples

Description

Statistical reports and data from sites such as the Australian Bureau of Statistics gather information for a particular field of research or to report on the views and habits of the population. Data collection may be performed via interviews, questionnaires, surveys, censuses and so on. You'll also be able to search for and access statistical information using MultiSearch and journal databases. Other important sites for statistics include the Australian Institute of Family Studies, Australian Institute of Health & Welfare and HILDA.

Purpose

An important part of the research in any field of study, statistical reporting and datasets are useful for description, analysis and comparison in your assessment tasks.

Examples