GREY MATTERS: a practical search tool for evidence based medicine

The Canadian Agency for Drugs and Technologies in Health (CADTH) has developed a new, free tool to assist in the process of identifying "gray literature" for evidence based medicine. While this is oriented towards EBM, it does have applicability to Evidence Based Nursing. First off, what exactly is "gray literature"? Gray literature is defined in wikipedia as "... a term used variably by the intelligence community, librarians, and medical and research professionals to refer to a body of materials that cannot be found easily through conventional channels such as publishers, "but which is frequently original and usually recent" in the words of M.C. Debachere". It goes without saying that gray literature usually does not appear in customary databases such as Pubmed and CINAHL. There are several resources for identifying gray literature but none are quite as comprehensive as the newly released tool from the CADTH GREY MATTERS: a practical search tool for evidence based medicine.
To access this tool, scroll down the page to Information Services and follow instructions to download the document.

While most of us would never go through this intensity of research for clinical topics, if you are developing a meta-analysis or systematic review, this could be useful. This tool will help you search for evidence based topics in both the international and US grey literature.