Grey Literature Searching for Systematic Reviews in the Health Sciences

摘要

The growing volume of scholarly information makes it difficult for professionalsto keep up with pertinent research literature. In the health sciences, standardbibliographic databases like PubMed that compile published articles are essentialfor the health care researcher and practitioner to obtain the latest peerreviewedinformation. Many research results are available outside the formalpublication process through unpublished reports, conference abstracts, preprints,and more, which are widely distributed across the internet. The systematicreview, a type of publication that pulls together and then appraisesfindings from multiple individual clinical trials, helps inform health-care providersin their practices. Clinical information changes with each new trial orreanalysis, making recency of the findings to be especially importance. Greyliterature is not peer-reviewed and omitting this time-consuming step mayhave the advantage of accelerating the process, which sometimes takes priorityin rapidly evolving medical topics. On the other hand, cursory reviews havetheir costs as seen in the rise of preprints discussing the coronavirus pandemicin 2020. In this paper, the author discusses the unique needs of grey literaturesearching in the health sciences with a focus on the systematic review andsimilar publication types. A well conducted literature search for these reviewsmust be carefully managed in a replicable manner, thoroughly documented,and transparently reported, all challenges for grey literature searching. As analternative to a highly sensitive strategy that a searcher commonly appliesusing standard bibliographic databases, the paper offers recommendations ona targeted approach specifying what grey document types to search and itsresources, that balances practicality while maintaining methodological rigor.Finally, it includes a brief primer on using Google to find grey information.