Grey literature is defined as materials produced in a variety of industry both in print and electronic formats outside the traditional commercial publishing channels.  Credible resources providing access to grey/gray literature include:

• Open Grey – this resource provides open access to over 700,000 references produced in Europe which include research reports, dissertations and conference papers
• OAIster – the database grants access to over 50 million digital resources that include digitized books, articles, newspapers  and manuscripts as well as audio files, video files, photographic images, data sets, theses and research papers
• Open Access Theses and Dissertations (OATD) – a repository of over 4 million open access theses and dissertations from over 1100 academic institutions

To learn more about grey literature, consult the MSK Library for further assistance.

Start your search with the National Guideline Clearinghouse (NGC).  As an initiative of the  Agency for Healthcare Research Quality, NGC’s aim is to provide healthcare professionals objective and detailed information on clinical practice guidelines.

Key features of the site include:

• Accessible via mobile devices
• Browsing by clinical specialty or professional organizations
• Creating custom email alerts on your preferred guideline summaries or topics

To learn more about this resource, view this tutorial (2:25 min) or you can Ask Us.

The Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) in PubMed is the National Library of Medicine’s controlled vocabulary used for indexing articles. These terms are helpful in retrieving publications on a specific topic. Some MeSH records will include a year to indicate when the subject heading was introduced to the database. But often times, the MeSH record may provide two distinct years, while other records may provide none. To learn more about dates in MeSH, see this recent video (1:48 min) from the National Library of Medicine Training Center.