Is grey literature acceptable in a college paper?

Yes, when the assignment allows non-journal sources and you name the document type. Instructors who require peer-reviewed articles only are excluding most grey literature on purpose. A WHO statistical report or a GAO audit is often stronger evidence for a policy claim than a magazine essay, and weaker evidence for a disciplinary theory claim than a journal article.

Is OpenGrey still the place to search European grey literature?

No. GreyNet states that OpenGrey was discontinued on 1 December 2020. The bibliographic dump is at DOI 10.17026/dans-xtf-47w5 (more than one million European records through 2018). For new searches use Science.gov for U.S. federal science, Grey Matters for health-technology sources, BASE and institutional repositories for theses, and the issuing organization's own publications page.

Is EThOS working again?

Yes. The British Library restored EThOS on 8 July 2026 after the 2023 cyber-attack. Search more than 650,000 UK doctoral-thesis records, including about 14,000 added since the outage, then follow Access thesis from university to the repository PDF. More than 400,000 theses are openly available from those repositories. Do not treat the EThOS record as the full text.

How is grey literature different from a preprint?

A preprint is one type of grey literature: a manuscript posted before peer review. Government reports, dissertations, and conference abstracts are also grey, and many of them will never become journal articles. If the preprint later appears as a version of record, cite that article unless you are discussing the preprint itself.

Do I have to search grey literature for a systematic review?

Cochrane MECIR C28 calls searching reports, dissertations, theses, and conference abstracts highly desirable, not mandatory in the same way as MEDLINE plus a trials register. Skip it only with a documented reason. Hopewell 2007 is why: published trials showed about a 9 percent greater treatment effect than grey trials.

How do I evaluate a think-tank report?

Run AACODS, then read the funding and "about" pages. Authority can be high while Objectivity is poor. Compare the same statistic in a national statistical office or WHO series. If the tank's number exists only in its own PDF, do not let it carry the paragraph.

Can I cite an unpublished dissertation?

Yes. APA 7 and Chicago both have dissertation forms. Name the university, the degree, and the repository or database you used. The APA dissertation guide and the Chicago dissertation guide are the citation pages; this page is only the discovery and evaluation rule.

What if the PDF has no date?

Tyndall's AACODS Date heading treats an undated item as something to avoid unless you can closely reconstruct the date from context. If you still must cite it, follow how to cite a source with no date rather than using the download day.

How do I cite a WHO, IPCC, or GAO report in APA 7?

Treat the organization as the group author, italicize the official title, add the ISBN or report number in parentheses when the cover prints one, omit a publisher that merely repeats the group author, and use the stable landing-page URL. Worked agency examples live on the APA government-report guide.

Which World health statistics edition should I cite?

Cite the edition you opened. The 2026 volume (ISBN 978-92-4-012248-2, 13 May 2026) supersedes 2025 (ISBN 978-92-4-011049-6). WHO says each edition replaces the previous one. Do not mix figures from two years in one sentence without naming both volumes.

How to Find Grey Literature for Academic Research [2026]

How to Find Grey Literature: Quick Answer

Start from the producing body, not from a journal database. If publishing is not that body's main job — a ministry, a university, a lab, a regulator, a think tank — the document is usually grey even when the PDF looks polished. Search the organization's site or a specialist portal, save a copy the day you find it, then evaluate it with AACODS before you cite it.

Copy-ready starting points

U.S. federal science and technical reports:

https://www.science.gov

Health-technology grey literature checklist:

https://greymatters.cda-amc.ca

Google filetype search (template):

"climate adaptation" report filetype:pdf site:.gov

Document-type keywords to add:

"technical report" OR "working paper" OR "policy brief" OR "white paper"

Clinical trial registry:

https://clinicaltrials.gov

Do not start at OpenGrey. GreyNet states that the OpenGrey repository was discontinued on 1 December 2020 and preserved as a closed archive. The bibliographic dump lives at DOI 10.17026/dans-xtf-47w5 (1,014,872 European records through 2018). That dump is not a search engine. GreyNet moved its own conference files to GreyGuide. For new searches use Science.gov, Grey Matters, institutional repositories, and the organization that issued the report.

What this page is for

CitationEasy already has a scholarly-versus-popular type map, a CRAAP evaluation walkthrough, a library search workflow, and citation pages for APA government reports and Chicago dissertations. Those pages share some source names. They do different jobs. This URL answers only: is this item grey literature, where do you find it now, and how do you decide whether to cite it?

The Official Definitions

The wording students still meet in library guides is the Luxembourg Convention definition, adopted at the Third International Conference on Grey Literature (GL3) on 13 November 1997. The Cochrane Handbook technical supplement to Chapter 4 (section 1.1.6) quotes it from Farace and Frantzen (1997):

Luxembourg definition (GL3, 13 November 1997)

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

On 6 December 2004, GL6 in New York City added a postscript so that a commercial-looking PDF from a ministry or a university press office would still count as grey. Cochrane quotes Farace and Frantzen (2005):

New York postscript (GL6, 6 December 2004)

not controlled by commercial publishers, i.e. where publishing is not the primary activity of the producing body

Joachim Schöpfel proposed a further expansion at the 2010 Prague conference. The Prague definition keeps the economic test and adds intellectual-property protection plus library-grade quality. The wording below is from Towards a Prague Definition of Grey Literature, later published in The Grey Journal 7, no. 1 (2011):

Prague definition (Schöpfel, 2010/2011)

Grey literature stands for manifold document types produced on all levels of government, academics, business and industry in print and electronic formats that are protected by intellectual property rights, of sufficient quality to be collected and preserved by library holdings or institutional repositories, but not controlled by commercial publishers i.e., where publishing is not the primary activity of the producing body.

In practice: a World Health Organization statistical report is grey. A journal article the same authors later publish in The Lancet is not. A doctoral dissertation sitting in a university repository is grey. The book revised from that dissertation is a commercial or university-press monograph. A preprint on arXiv is grey until a version of record appears. Peer review is common in journals and rare as a formal step for reports; absence of peer review does not by itself make a source unusable, and presence of a committee or internal review does not make it a journal article.

Why Grey Literature Matters: Publication Bias

The reason systematic reviewers hunt for reports, theses, and abstracts is not completeness for its own sake. Studies with statistically significant or commercially convenient results are more likely to appear in journals. Cochrane Chapter 4, section 4.3.5, and the Methodological Expectations of Cochrane Intervention Reviews (MECIR) standard C28 therefore call a grey-literature search highly desirable:

MECIR C28, Cochrane Handbook Chapter 4, Box 4.3.e

Standard:

Search relevant grey literature sources such as reports, dissertations, theses and conference abstracts.

Rationale:

Searches for studies should be as extensive as possible in order to reduce the risk of publication bias and to identify as much relevant evidence as possible.

The evidence behind that standard is a Cochrane methodology review. Hopewell, McDonald, Clarke, and Egger compared published trials with grey trials across five studies. Their 2007 review (DOI 10.1002/14651858.MR000010.pub3) found that published trials were larger and more optimistic:

Hopewell et al., Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, 2007

This showed that, on average, published trials showed a 9% greater treatment effect than grey trials (ratio of odds ratios for grey versus published trials 1.09; 95% CI 1.03-1.16).

This review shows that published trials tend to be larger and show an overall greater treatment effect than grey trials. This has important implications for reviewers who need to ensure they identify grey trials, in order to minimise the risk of introducing bias into their review.

The same technical supplement cites Ziai and colleagues (2017): in an audit of 203 systematic reviews from high-impact general medical journals in 2013, 64 percent described an attempt to search for unpublished studies together with dissertations and theses, and Cochrane reviews were significantly more likely to include a grey-literature search than reviews in standard journals. For a course paper you are not running a Cochrane review. The same bias still matters. If you only read journals, you will over-sample positive, polished, English-language results and miss the agency evaluation that found no effect, the thesis that documented a failed replication, or the conference abstract that never became an article. Use grey literature to fill those gaps, then say in your prose that the source is a report, a thesis, or a preprint — not "a study" in the journal sense.

What Counts as Grey Literature

The Prague wording says "manifold document types." The table below is the working set students actually meet. Each row names a real document you can open, not an invented title.

Common grey-literature types with a real, identifiable example
Type	Why it is grey	Real example
International organization report	WHO's primary job is public health, not commercial publishing	World Health Organization, World health statistics 2026 (ISBN 978-92-4-012248-2)
Intergovernmental assessment	The IPCC synthesizes research for governments	IPCC, Climate Change 2023: Synthesis Report (AR6 SYR)
National audit report	GAO's job is oversight, not selling books	U.S. Government Accountability Office, High-Risk Series (GAO-25-107743, 25 February 2025)
National agency booklet	A health institute issued it; APA Style uses it as the report example	National Cancer Institute, Taking time: Support for people with cancer (NIH Publication No. 18-2059, 2019)
Doctoral dissertation	Submitted for a degree, not sold as a book	Ivan Edward Sutherland, Sketchpad: A Man-Machine Graphical Communication System (PhD diss., MIT, 1963)
Preprint	Posted before peer review	Vaswani et al., "Attention Is All You Need," arXiv:1706.03762 (12 June 2017)
Clinical trial record	A registry entry, not a journal article	ClinicalTrials.gov NCT04368728, Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine study

The Chicago dissertation guide walks through the note and bibliography forms for that same MIT 1963 thesis.

Worked example: the current WHO statistics report

WHO has issued World health statistics every year since 2005. The 2026 edition (13 May 2026) consolidates health-related Sustainable Development Goal indicators and reviews healthy life expectancy, premature mortality, the Triple Billion targets, and inequalities in immunization. The PDF itself prints ISBN 978-92-4-012248-2 (electronic) and 978-92-4-012249-9 (print); the publications record lists 59 pages. The landing page is the WHO publications record. Cite the edition you actually opened. The 2025 volume (ISBN 978-92-4-011049-6, 15 May 2025) is a different document.

Identify the document before you cite it

Producer:

World Health Organization

Title:

World health statistics 2026: monitoring health for the SDGs, sustainable development goals

ISBN (electronic, from the PDF):

978-92-4-012248-2

Stable URL:

https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789240122482

Worked example: an IPCC assessment

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is a United Nations body. Its Sixth Assessment Report synthesis, Climate Change 2023, released 20 March 2023, remains the current synthesis: the seventh cycle began in July 2023 and has not replaced AR6 SYR. Download the Summary for Policymakers or the full volume from the AR6 SYR page. Cite the volume you actually read. A newspaper story about the report is a different source; so is a later journal article that re-analyzes one figure.

Worked example: a numbered GAO report

The U.S. Government Accountability Office issues numbered audits that never appear as journal articles. The current comprehensive High-Risk Series update is High-Risk Series: Heightened Attention Could Save Billions More and Improve Government Efficiency and Effectiveness, GAO-25-107743, published 25 February 2025. The product page is https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-25-107743. Record the GAO number the day you download the file. GAO-26-108824 (16 December 2025) is later testimony that cites that February 2025 series; it is not a replacement High-Risk Series report. A press release about the High-Risk List is a different source again.

Where to Search Now

Many library guides still list OpenGrey as if it were a live European portal. It is not. Use the sources below, and write down the date you searched — web results are not reproducible the way a MEDLINE search is. Cochrane Chapter 4 is blunt about copies:

Cochrane Handbook Chapter 4 on internet finds

It is particularly important to save locally or file print copies of any information found on the internet, such as information about ongoing and/or unpublished trials, as this information may no longer be accessible at the time the review is written.

The results of web searches will not be reproducible to the same extent as bibliographic database searches because web content and search engine algorithms frequently change, and search results can differ between users due to a general move towards localization and personalization.

Portals built for grey literature

[Science.gov](https://www.science.gov): official U.S. government federated search across federal scientific and technical results, hosted with CENDI. Use it when you do not know which agency funded the work. The About page says the latest version is in BETA. Science.gov is not a grey-only database: its FAQ lists reports and peer-reviewed journal articles, data, and software. Filter for the report or technical document you actually need.
[Grey Matters](https://greymatters.cda-amc.ca) (Canada's Drug Agency, formerly CADTH): an open checklist of health-technology assessment agencies, regulators, guideline producers, and trial registries. The live homepage citation, opened 16 September 2026, is Grey Matters: A Tool for Searching Health-related Grey Literature. Ottawa: Canada's Drug Agency; 2025.
[GreyNet / GreyGuide](https://www.greynet.org): the conference series that wrote the Luxembourg and New York wording. Use GreyGuide for GreyNet's own conference papers, not as a universal search engine.
OpenGrey archive: closed 1 December 2020. Download the bibliographic dump from DOI 10.17026/dans-xtf-47w5; do not tell readers to "search OpenGrey" as if the website still works.
[BASE](https://www.base-search.net) (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine): harvests institutional repositories, including theses and reports.

Grey Matters on what the tool is for

Grey literature includes government information and reports that are not published commercially and may be inaccessible via bibliographic databases.

Theses and dissertations

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global: largest subscription file; your library may license it.
[EThOS](https://ethos.bl.uk) (British Library): UK doctoral-thesis metadata, restored on 8 July 2026 after the 2023 cyber-attack. The British Library announcement says the new platform holds descriptions of more than 650,000 theses from the 1700s onward, including about 14,000 records added since the service went offline, and that more than 400,000 theses are openly available from university repositories. Use the Access thesis from university button; EThOS does not host the PDF. A backlog of updates is still being loaded, and the Library said later in 2026 it will consult users about the restored platform.
[NDLTD](https://ndltd.org): Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations, with national portals.
[DART-Europe](https://www.dart-europe.org): European research theses.
The degree-granting university's institutional repository: often the only legal full text.

Government and intergovernmental reports

[GovInfo](https://www.govinfo.gov): U.S. federal publications, including Congressional and agency documents.
[GAO](https://www.gao.gov): U.S. Government Accountability Office audits and evaluations, each with a GAO number. Example: GAO-25-107743.
[CRS reports](https://crsreports.congress.gov): Congressional Research Service briefing papers.
[World Bank Open Knowledge Repository](https://openknowledge.worldbank.org): development reports and working papers.
[WHO publications](https://www.who.int/publications): World Health Organization reports, including World health statistics.
[OECD](https://www.oecd.org): economic and policy reports; some titles sit behind OECD iLibrary.
[UN iLibrary](https://www.un-ilibrary.org): United Nations publications.
[IPCC](https://www.ipcc.ch): assessment reports, methodology reports, and special reports.

Preprints, working papers, and trial records

[arXiv](https://arxiv.org): physics, mathematics, computer science, and neighboring fields. Example: arXiv:1706.03762.
[bioRxiv](https://www.biorxiv.org) and [medRxiv](https://www.medrxiv.org): life-science and health preprints. medRxiv screens for dangerous clinical claims; it is still not peer review.
[SSRN](https://www.ssrn.com): social-science working papers.
[RePEc](https://ideas.repec.org): economics working papers.
[PsyArXiv](https://psyarxiv.com): psychology preprints.
[ClinicalTrials.gov](https://clinicaltrials.gov) and the [WHO ICTRP](https://trialsearch.who.int): protocol and results records. Example: NCT04368728, completed 10 February 2023. The registry record is not the same source as Polack et al., New England Journal of Medicine 383, no. 27 (2020), which reports the trial.

Conference papers and think tanks

IEEE Xplore and the ACM Digital Library index many computer-science and engineering proceedings; some of those papers later appear as journal articles and some do not. For policy research, Brookings, RAND, the Urban Institute, CSIS, and Pew Research Center all issue reports that are grey literature. Read the funding page before you treat a think-tank PDF as neutral evidence. Compare one finding across two organizations that do not share a donor.

Search Strategies That Actually Work

A keyword in Google Scholar will find some reports and miss most agency PDFs. Combine four tactics: a specialist portal, a document-type string, a site-limited web search, and citation chasing from a paper you already trust. That last step is the same citation-chaining move used for journal literature.

Document-type strings

Add one of these to the topic, in quotes

"technical report"
"working paper"
"white paper"
"policy brief"
"conference paper"
"government report"
"research report"
"evaluation report"

Web-search operators

Google's filetype: and site: operators remain the fastest way to surface PDFs that no bibliographic database ingested. Escape the asterisk if you truncate a word in other tools; Google's own * wildcard is a different operator from a library psycholog* truncation.

Operators you can paste

U.S. government PDFs:

"heat island" mitigation filetype:pdf site:.gov

International organization domain:

"routine immunization" coverage site:who.int

One known series:

"World health statistics" 2026 site:who.int

Organization-first searching

List the agencies, labs, NGOs, and professional bodies that actually work on the question.
Open each Publications, Research, or Resources page rather than trusting a web crawl.
Note the report number, ISBN, or series on the cover the moment you download the file.
If the PDF is a summary, look for the underlying data tables or the longer technical annex.
Record the URL and the date. Cochrane Chapter 4 warns that web searches will not be reproducible the way a database search is.

Evaluate Grey Literature with AACODS

Do not run the same CRAAP checklist you use on a website and call the job done. Jessica Tyndall at Flinders University designed AACODS in November 2010 specifically for grey literature. The official PDF opens with this sentence:

Tyndall, AACODS checklist (Flinders University, November 2010)

The AACODS checklist is designed to enable evaluation and critical appraisal of grey literature.

AACODS headings

Authority — who is responsible for the intellectual content?
Accuracy — stated aim, methodology, references, and whether the item was reviewed or edited.
Coverage — are limitations imposed, and are they stated?
Objectivity — can bias be detected?
Date — is there a stated date related to the content?
Significance — would the research area be lesser without this item?

Tyndall's Authority prompts include "Is the organisation reputable? (e.g. W.H.O)" and "Does the item have a detailed reference list or bibliography?" Accuracy asks whether data collection is explicit and whether a policy brief that summarizes a technical report sends you back to the original. Date is unforgiving: if you cannot find or closely reconstruct a date, treat the item as too weak to carry a claim. Significance is the question journal prestige never answers: does this document add something unique?

How the test changes by document type

Government and UN reports: usually strong on Authority and Date. Still read the mandate. An audit office and a cabinet communications shop are not the same producer.
Think-tank reports: Authority can look excellent on letterhead. Objectivity is the failure mode. Find the funder, then read a second tank that does not share that funder.
Dissertations: committee-reviewed, not journal peer-reviewed. Quality tracks the program. Prefer the repository copy you actually read, and say it is a thesis.
Preprints: no journal peer review yet. Search the DOI or the title for a later article. If the article exists, cite the version of record unless you are writing about the preprint itself.
Conference papers: often early results. Check whether a fuller paper was published. Some IEEE and ACM venues review rigorously; many abstract-only meetings do not.
Trial registry records: useful for methods and outcomes that never appeared in a journal. They are not a substitute for the clinical study report or the article. NCT04368728 is the registry; Polack et al. 2020 is the journal report of the same trial.

Red flags that survive every checklist

No named person and no accountable organization.
Funding or a sponsor mentioned nowhere, including the back cover and PDF properties.
Methods described as "proprietary" with no data source.
A polished PDF that contradicts a WHO, IPCC, or national statistical series without explaining the discrepancy.
A URL that works today and a file you did not save.

How to Cite Grey Literature

Citation is a separate job from discovery. APA 7 treats most reports in §10.4. The official APA Style government-agency example is the National Cancer Institute booklet Taking Time. Use that form for agency reports; use the full APA report guide when the title page names people instead of an agency, or when you have a NASA, NCES, or GAO number to place.

Official APA 7 government-report example

Reference:

National Cancer Institute. (2019). Taking time: Support for people with cancer (NIH Publication No. 18-2059). U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, National Institutes of Health. https://www.cancer.gov/publications/patient-education/takingtime.pdf

Parenthetical citation:

(National Cancer Institute, 2019)

Narrative citation:

National Cancer Institute (2019)

Templates for other grey items (not official examples)

APA 7 report, group author, publisher omitted:

Agency Name. (Year). Title of report (Report No. xxx). https://xxxxx

APA 7 dissertation in a repository:

Author, A. A. (Year). Title of dissertation [Doctoral dissertation, University Name]. Repository Name. https://xxxxx

APA 7 preprint:

Author, A. A. (Year). Title of preprint. Repository Name. https://doi.org/xxxxx

Chicago Notes-Bibliography puts an unpublished dissertation title in quotation marks and names the degree, university, and year — see how to cite a dissertation in Chicago. For a numbered government report, Chicago's government-document page is the sibling, not this one. Whatever the style, record the report number, the version or edition statement, and a URL or DOI the day you download the file. Retrieval dates belong on unstable pages, not on a DOI.

Failure Modes Students Hit

Treating OpenGrey as live. It closed in 2020. Use Science.gov, Grey Matters, repositories, and the issuing organization. The DANS dump is for historians of the file, not for a new topic search.
Treating Science.gov as a grey-only database. The portal is live and in BETA. It also returns journal articles and datasets. Open the record and decide whether you found a report.
Treating EThOS as a PDF warehouse. The restored 2026 platform is metadata. Follow the university-repository link, or you will cite a record you never read.
Citing the preprint after the article exists. Search the title. If a journal version of record is out, that is usually the source to cite.
Citing a think-tank brief as if it were a statistical agency. AACODS Objectivity is the test; funding pages are part of the source.
Citing GAO testimony as the High-Risk Series. GAO-26-108824 cites GAO-25-107743; it does not replace it. Record the number on the cover you opened.
Dropping the report number. NIH Publication, GAO, NASA/CR, and WHO ISBN strings are how later readers retrieve the same file.
Pasting a database session URL. Prefer the .gov or organization landing page, or a DOI.
Using today's date as the publication date. Dates describe the document. See how to cite a source with no date when the cover is silent.
Calling every PDF "a study." Say report, thesis, preprint, or registry record in the sentence.
Citing last year's WHO statistics as if they were this year's. Each World health statistics volume supersedes the previous one. Check the ISBN. Do not mix 2026 (978-92-4-012248-2) figures with 2025 (978-92-4-011049-6) in one sentence without naming both volumes.
Citing the trial registry as the journal article. NCT04368728 is the ClinicalTrials.gov record. Polack et al. 2020 is the NEJM report of that trial.

When Grey Literature Is Essential — and When It Is Not

Reach for grey literature

Policy, regulation, or program evaluation
Current statistics an article has not yet absorbed
A systematic review or evidence synthesis
Local or practitioner evidence journals ignore
Methods or results that exist only as a thesis, preprint, or registry record

Do not stop at grey literature

A claim that already has a version of record
A theory paper your field expects you to take from journals
A methods course that required peer-reviewed sources only — ask before you substitute a report
A number you cannot cross-check in a second independent series

Build the spine of the paper with scholarly sources you found through a library search. Add grey literature for currency, local detail, and the studies journals never printed. If you cannot retrieve the file next month, you did not finish the search.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is grey literature acceptable in a college paper?: Yes, when the assignment allows non-journal sources and you name the document type. Instructors who require peer-reviewed articles only are excluding most grey literature on purpose. A WHO statistical report or a GAO audit is often stronger evidence for a policy claim than a magazine essay, and weaker evidence for a disciplinary theory claim than a journal article.
Is OpenGrey still the place to search European grey literature?: No. GreyNet states that OpenGrey was discontinued on 1 December 2020. The bibliographic dump is at DOI 10.17026/dans-xtf-47w5 (more than one million European records through 2018). For new searches use Science.gov for U.S. federal science, Grey Matters for health-technology sources, BASE and institutional repositories for theses, and the issuing organization's own publications page.
Is EThOS working again?: Yes. The British Library restored EThOS on 8 July 2026 after the 2023 cyber-attack. Search more than 650,000 UK doctoral-thesis records, including about 14,000 added since the outage, then follow Access thesis from university to the repository PDF. More than 400,000 theses are openly available from those repositories. Do not treat the EThOS record as the full text.
How is grey literature different from a preprint?: A preprint is one type of grey literature: a manuscript posted before peer review. Government reports, dissertations, and conference abstracts are also grey, and many of them will never become journal articles. If the preprint later appears as a version of record, cite that article unless you are discussing the preprint itself.
Do I have to search grey literature for a systematic review?: Cochrane MECIR C28 calls searching reports, dissertations, theses, and conference abstracts highly desirable, not mandatory in the same way as MEDLINE plus a trials register. Skip it only with a documented reason. Hopewell 2007 is why: published trials showed about a 9 percent greater treatment effect than grey trials.
How do I evaluate a think-tank report?: Run AACODS, then read the funding and "about" pages. Authority can be high while Objectivity is poor. Compare the same statistic in a national statistical office or WHO series. If the tank's number exists only in its own PDF, do not let it carry the paragraph.
Can I cite an unpublished dissertation?: Yes. APA 7 and Chicago both have dissertation forms. Name the university, the degree, and the repository or database you used. The APA dissertation guide and the Chicago dissertation guide are the citation pages; this page is only the discovery and evaluation rule.
What if the PDF has no date?: Tyndall's AACODS Date heading treats an undated item as something to avoid unless you can closely reconstruct the date from context. If you still must cite it, follow how to cite a source with no date rather than using the download day.
How do I cite a WHO, IPCC, or GAO report in APA 7?: Treat the organization as the group author, italicize the official title, add the ISBN or report number in parentheses when the cover prints one, omit a publisher that merely repeats the group author, and use the stable landing-page URL. Worked agency examples live on the APA government-report guide.
Which World health statistics edition should I cite?: Cite the edition you opened. The 2026 volume (ISBN 978-92-4-012248-2, 13 May 2026) supersedes 2025 (ISBN 978-92-4-011049-6). WHO says each edition replaces the previous one. Do not mix figures from two years in one sentence without naming both volumes.

Cite the report you actually found

Once you have a real PDF — a WHO edition, a GAO number, a dissertation in a repository — format it in the style your syllabus names. The APA report page handles agency title pages; the dissertation pages handle theses.

Cite a government report in APA 7 Open the APA generator