DNP Nursing Inquiry Search

Gray Literature

Gray Literature is “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” (1997- The Luxembourg Convention on Grey Literature)

Examples:  reports, proceedings, dissertations & thesis, registered trials, white papers, book chapters, newsletters, patents

Clinical Trial Registries

Trial registries are important resources for identifying ongoing and completed trials since many trials and their results are not formally published. 

Types of registries include:

• National and international registries
• Subject-specific registries
• Pharmaceutical registries
• Trial results registries

Hand Searching

• Handsearching is the manual process of reviewing journal issues or conference proceedings to locate articles or reports of articles that may have been missed during the electronic search process.
• It is typically done electronically by clicking through online journals and conference websites.
• Consider handsearching journals that (1) are not indexed in PubMed or Embase or (2) are the most popular journals covering a particular topic.
• The Cochrane Collaboration maintains master lists of journals and conference proceedings being handsearched for clinical trials.

Citation Searching

Citation searching involves manually checking reference lists of selected papers.  It is an excellent method to . . .

• Find relevant articles you may have missed.
• Find later articles that cite an article you’ve identified as important.
• Explore the earlier articles cited by an article.

Forward Searching:  Use 'Cited By' links to identify later articles that cite an article you’ve identified as important.

Backward Searching:  Use 'Reference Lists' to explore the earlier articles cited by an article. 

You can search for citations using Scopus or Web of Science.