One of the largest sources of gray literature to date is the World Wide Web. If you are looking for publications that fit this definition of gray literature, ask a reference librarian for assistance. The Library has numerous indexes, encompassing all subject areas and types of publications. Often indexes and abstracts cover a specific subject area, such as Chemical Abstracts , or a group of interrelated disciplines, such as Social Sciences Index or Applied Science and Technology Index . In most indexes you may look under an author or a subject.
Abstracts go a step further and provide a paragraph summarizing the article.
Often you can tell from the abstract whether or not the article is an in-depth journal article or a more superficial magazine article. Searching for abstracts and citations is easier in these databases because they allow for searching more than one year at a time. One disadvantage to electronic databases is that they generally don t have a very extensive backfile, often only the last ten to fifteen years. When searching for older articles, print indexes and abstracts remain the only option. Click on Articles, Indexes, and Databases to get an alphabetical listing of the databases by title.