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Source evaluation

Grey literature

Also called: gray literature

Research and reporting published outside commercial channels: government and NGO reports, working papers, theses, standards, and conference material.

Grey literature is where a great deal of policy-relevant evidence lives. It is not peer-reviewed in the journal sense, it is often not indexed, and it moves or disappears — which is why citing it well means recording the issuing body, the report number, the date, and a stable URL or repository handle.

Systematic reviews search it deliberately, because excluding it biases the evidence base towards published, positive results.

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