![]() ![]() They present different scenarios for undertaking searching for grey literature and suggest resources for each scenario. Haddaway and Bayliss consider grey literature in two forms: unpublished academic research and research that is generated by practitioners. Other related work is framed around searching for ‘grey literature’, where the aim is to seek out relevant literature that is not published in academic journals. There is some specific guidance on web-searching for systematic reviews published by the Centre for Environmental Evidence, with emphasis on using search engines. We briefly describe our approach in Brunton et al. While there is established guidance on conducting systematic searches of bibliographic databases, it is less clear how to approach searching websites for systematic reviews. This finding is based on data from eight systematic reviews, of which four concern interventions in international development, and four concern people’s views to inform to UK public health policy initiatives. For some systematic reviews undertaken at the Evidence for Policy and Practice Information and Co-ordinating Centre (EPPI-Centre), over a quarter of relevant citations were found from websites and internet search engines. We previously observed that relevant literature for low- and middle-income countries, such as working and policy papers, is often not included in databases, and is located from organisational websites, contacting authors or internet search engines. Other complementary searching approaches include asking key contacts and authors, hand-searching journals, cited-reference searching and checking references. The value and rationale for utilising these resources varies between reviews and within review teams. They include websites of organisations, institutional repositories, research registers, online library catalogues and internet search engines. Such resources vary widely in terms of appearance, functionality and content. We use the term ‘websites’ in a broad sense to refer to online resources that lack the functionality to carry out complex Boolean searches, or export results, or do not readily provide a search history. Our focus is on websites and online resources outside academic bibliographic databases. ![]() Where websites are relied upon to identify important literature for a review, it raises the issue of how the search is transparent, accountable and reproducible. Problems encountered when searching websites with limited search functionality include large search outputs, empirical research hidden on websites within a wealth of other material and lack of abstracts. In comparison with bibliographic databases, there are greater challenges in deciding which websites and online resources to use, running complex searches, exporting search results and documenting the process. Approaches might involve searching websites, search engines or online repositories and typically require searching and browsing (reading and navigating) techniques that differ from approaches to searching bibliographic databases. However, literature is often sought outside of bibliographic databases, regardless of subject discipline or methodological focus of the review. These functions support transparency, accountability and reproducibility of the search process, in line with accepted principles of literature searches for systematic reviews. The functionality of these databases facilitates highly structured Boolean searching, automated recording of search history and bulk exporting of results. Many systematic reviews use topic-specific bibliographic databases to identify literature in a ‘systematic’ way.
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