Grey literature refers to both published and unpublished research material that is not available commercially.
Some examples of grey literature are:
Grey literature can be the best source of up-to-date research on some topics note however that grey literature is usually not subject to peer review and must be evaluated accordingly.
Please do let us know if you discover a source you feel would be a good addition to the guide.
Some of our databases include grey literature such as conference papers and theses as well as journal articles. You may also find the sources below helpful in finding grey literature.
The Library holds all Swansea University theses at doctorate level and some masters. We do not usually keep third year projects or dissertations. Most of our dissertations are kept in locked storage at Singleton Park Campus.
Information about all theses received by the library can be found on iFind, the library catalogue.
In the iFind search box, enter your topic keyword search and the words: swansea thesis. You can then use the Refine bar to limit to a range of years or particular Colleges. If you are particularly interested in recent theses you can change the Sort by menu at the top of the results list to Date descending to bring the most recent to the top.
The dissertations are for reference use only, so they must not be taken out of the library.
Please ask at the Information Desk if you would like to look at a thesis.
ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global is the world's most comprehensive collection of dissertations and theses from around the world, spanning from 1743 to the present day and offering 24-page full text previews for graduate works added since 1997, along with selected previews for works written prior to 1997. It contains a significant amount of new international dissertations and theses both in citations and in full text.
EThOS has been created to offer a single point of access to UK theses and plays a significant role in showcasing UK research to the world. EThOS, which is hosted by the British Library, has more than 100 UK universities involved in the project and can offer an ever expanding range of titles as full text downloads. If an item you require is already in EThOS then it is immediately available for download to your desktop free of charge; if not, then you can choose to purchase a scanned copy from EThOS.
Google can be a useful tool for finding information online. However, it can be difficult to find the most relevant and reliable sources of information from a list of thousands or millions of results. Don't assume the results at the top are the best ones! The following strategies will help you search Google more effectively.
Use your keywords and the command site:url to find results from one website or from a group of websites. For instance, a search for foundation phase site:gov.wales will find information about the Foundation Phase from the Welsh Government website. You could use site:ac.uk to search academic websites.
Use the command filetype: to limit your search to a particular type of document. This can be useful if you are looking for a certain type of information. For example, if you government documents are likely to be published in PDF form, so you could use filetype:pdf to limit your results to PDFs and make it easier to find what you need. Numerical data is likely to appear in a spreadsheet, so you could use filetype:xls to look for Excel documents.
Google Scholar searches scholarly literature such as journal articles and abstracts, but you may have difficulty accessing the full-text of the material you find. Linking your Google Scholar account to Swansea University will help with this. Just go to the settings cog from the menu
and then go to Library Links to find Swansea University.
Although Google Scholar can be useful, iFind and subject databases such as Science Direct have certain key advantages:-