TEXAS SLA PRESENTATION:DISCOVERING GREY LITERATURE SCIENCEAND TECHNOLOGY RESOURCESMatthew Von Hendy MA/MLS

Green Heron Information Services

WELCOME!

Owner—Green Heron

Information Services

Professional

Librarian—National

Academies of Science,

EPA, NASA

Birder, cyclist, runner—

recent Alaskan

adventurer

SESSION GOALS

Briefly discuss what defines grey literature, what

type of resources are covered/what are not, trends

and issues in this area

Cover key search tools for scitech grey literature

and touch on strengths/weakness of each

Touch on repositories, data and datasets as scitech

grey literature sources

Discuss subject specific databases that contain

extensive scitech grey literature

Questions and answers

A FEW NOTES

Scientific and technology grey literature resources

will our major topic

We will not be covering health sciences grey

literature resources…

Or highly specialized scitech greylit resources such

as patents

Focus primarily on open access, low/cost resources

although we will touch on a few subscription

databases/resources

WHAT IS GREY LITERATURE?

Pull up a chair and have some coffee/tea…no

snoring..

WHAT IS GREY LITERATURE (CONT.)

That which is produced on all levels of government,

academics, business and industry in print and

electronic formats, but which is not controlled by

commercial publishers."PloS description– The

Fourth International Conference on Grey Literature

1999

Peer-reviewed journal articles,

academic/commercially published books

WHAT DOES THAT LEAVE?

MANY FORMATS

Technical reports

Pre-Prints

Fact Sheets

Standards

Patents

Working papers

Committee reports

Business documents

Newsletters

Government documents

Technical documentation

Conference proceedings

White papers

Symposia

Bulletins

Conference Papers

BENEFITS OF SCITECH GREYLIT

Provide high level overviews

Recent bibliographies

Source of cutting edge information– grey literature

can frequently appear before conventional

academic literature

Source of statistics and datasets

LIMITATIONS OF SCITECH GREY LIT

Reliability of information—is there any peer-review

or evidence base

Who is publishing it—have you heard of the

organization and/or do they have a particular point

of view

Searchability—even if it’s a great or useful piece of

work can it be found?

STATUS OF SCITECH GREYLIT SEARCH

The Mediocre, the Bad and the Ugly

(apologies to Clint Eastwood)

SEARCH TOOLS– THE MEDIOCRE

SciTech Connect http://www.osti.gov/scitech/

Consolidates OSTI’s Information Bridge and Energy

Citations database.

Science Gov http://www.science.gov/scigov/

Searches over 50 U.S. Government science-related

databases and websites

WorldWideScience.Org --

http://worldwidescience.org/wws/

Federated search that covers national and

international government science resources

SEARCH TOOLS – THE BAD

OAIster http://oaister.worldcat.org/advancedsearch

Open access project started by University of

Michigan—picked up by OCLC-designed to pick up

hard to find grey literature

Tip: Corporate/Conference Name can be very useful

Open DOAR Content Search

http://www.opendoar.org/search.php

Maintained by the University of Nottingham—very

good quality control. A directory of open access

directories—many scitech organizations included

SEARCH TOOLS – THE UGLY

Google Scholar – scholar.google.com

Use Advanced Search features

Tip: Use ‘thesis dissertation’ in the ‘with at least one

of the words’ field if you are looking for these

Google – www.google.com

Tip: Limit your search to a specific domain or site

and use the filtertype search filter since a lot of gray

literature appears as PDFs

SUBSCRIPTION DATABASES

Scopus, Web of Science—conference papers

Proquest Dissertations Abstracts--- maybe

dissertations and theses?

Biosis, Compendex, GeoRef, IEEE Xplore, Inspec,

Environment Sciences and Pollution Management–

conference papers, meeting publications, some

technical reports

INSTITUTIONAL REPOSITORIES

See Ranking Web of Repositories for a decent

listing of US university repositories

http://repositories.webometrics.info/en/Americas/USA

Just some examples:

Virginia Tech Institutional Repository

http://vtechworks.lib.vt.edu/

MIT Institutional Repository

http://dspace.mit.edu/

DON’T FORGET ABOUT DATA AS A SCITECH

GREYLIT RESOURCE

Explosive growth, development of many resources

Databib— http://databib.org/

Major directory of data repositories—searchable

Dryad --- http://datadryad.org/

Focuses on data sets from journal articles—DOI

assigned (digital object identifier) to datasets

Brian Westra’s (University of Oregon library) excellent guide to data research management resources--http://library.uoregon.edu/datamanagement/repositories.html

WEB OF GREY DATABASES

Agricola-- http://agricola.nal.usda.gov/

Agriculture and agriculture-related database from the

USDA

Defense Technical Information Center

http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/

A searchable repository for all publicly accessible

DOD science and technical research

ENERGIZING INFORMATION

ENTEWEB World Energy Base

https://www.etde.org/etdeweb/basicsearch.jsp?pg=

2

International database covering all aspects of energy

research. Being phased out for..

WorldWideEnergy (Beta)

http://worldwideenergy.org/

Federated search approach—how much content and

how many countries contributing?

IAEA’s INIS Database http://www.iaea.org/inis/

International Nuclear Information System database

on nuclear science and technology

TECHNICAL REPORTS

National Technical Information Service-

http://www.ntis.gov

Source for unclassified reports from U.S. government

and international government agencies. 2 million plus

records. Vendor interfaces much more user friendly.

Most documents don’t wind up here.

NASA Technical Reports Server

http://nix.nasa.gov/search.jsp?N=125

NASA funded aerospace and related research.

ASTROPHYSICS AND GEOLOGY

SAO/NASA (ADS) Astrophysics Data System

NASA adsabs.harvard.edu/index.html Funded

by SAO/NASA (ADS) Astrophysics Data System

NASA, ADS maintains 3 bibliographic databases -

Astronomy and Astrophysics, Physics and

Geophysics, and ArXiv Preprints - containing more

than 8.5 million records

United States Geological Service Publications

Warehouse http://pubs.er.usgs.gov/

Database of USGS funded research reports and

publications.

ACADEMIC RESEARCH DATABASES

arXiv-- http://arxiv.org/

Provides open access to nearly 800,000 e-prints in

the area of physics, mathematics, computer science,

quantitative biology, quantitative finance and

statistics.

CiteSeer http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/

Digital library and search engine focused on

computer and information science.

INSPIRE-HEP http://inspirehep.net/

A database of high energy, particle physics and

astrophysics.

DATABASES EXTRA--

Dozens of open access technical scientific

databases with primarily grey information are also

available

An excellent example—listing of open access

databases in geology and marine sciences from the

University of New Orleans library

http://libguides.uno.edu/content.php?pid=161121&sid

=1400581

THE FINAL FRONTIER: IS IT SPACE OR

SCITECH GREY LITERATURE?

FUTURE TRENDS SCITECH GREYLIT

Increasing quantity—perhaps decreasing quality

More collaborative—people will be able to

manipulate documents in real time

Problems with finding resources will start to be

addressed—metadata should be able to provide a

solution—financial incentive for government

agencies/vendors to tackle this issue

QUESTIONS?

CONNECT WITH ME

Matthew Von Hendy

Green Heron Information Services

(240) 401-7433

info@greenheroninfo.com

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LinkedIn www.linkedin.com/in/vonhendy

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