Monday, October 22, 2012

Identifying Grey Literature: DocuBase database


The term, grey literature, is often used to refer to written material that is difficult to find through conventional channels because it is not published commercially or is generally inaccessible. However, these types of documents are often extremely valuable to legal researcher as they can include working papers, patents, technical reports and white papers from government agencies, NGOs, think tanks, research institutes and other public interest organizations.

A useful resource for identifying such literature is the online website, DocuTicker, which includes a database called DocuBase that provides not only an abstract for each document included, but also links to the full-text PDFs.  Each document is also tagged by source (e,g, Amnesty International), article category (e.g., Congressional Research Service) and source category (e.g., Think Tank), so it's very easy to browse their content for relevant material.

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