Paging Dr. Grey: Implications for Embedding Grey Literature Instruction in Nursing Education

Background: Librarians play a key role in the understanding, retrieval, and assessment of grey literature. This includes the incorporation of grey literature in evidence-based nursing, but grey literature understanding is not widely disseminated to learners, leaving research knowledge gaps. With a general increase in scholarly works, and in curriculum specific requirements of evidence-based research, such as systematic reviews, grey literature instruction is becoming more of a necessity than a side-thought. Librarians and educators have a unique opportunity to develop and incorporate grey literature instruction into nursing curricula, with specific focus on its definition, value, discoverability, evaluation, and synthesis.

Description: Grey literature instruction can be daunting for both the instructors and the learners, but if it is approached specific goals in mind, it becomes a manageable and constructive learning experience. The structured approach to grey literature instruction includes:

Goal 1, Define: Understand what “grey literature” is & define specific types (conference proceedings, government documents, news, corporate organizations, theses and dissertations, and higher education).
Goal 2, Value: Understand the difference between popular, potentially less credible, information and grey literature. What is the value of each type of grey literature – what is each’s contribution?
Goal 3, Discover: Understand where and how to look for grey literature, tying it into the research question, and this process’s challenges.
Goal 4, Evaluate: Understand how to assess each type of grey literature.
Goals 5, Synthesize: Understand how to incorporate grey literature findings into evidence-based research.

Conclusion: Grey literature instruction has the potential to grow student and faculty knowledge bases. It will lead to stronger researchers capable of locating, analyzing, and absorbing this subset of resources into their spheres, enhancing the scholarly conversations. The limited literature about grey literature instruction, as well as current application in a graduate nursing curriculum, has shown it to be beneficial. While this session focuses on nursing education, grey literature instruction is not limited to this field. This approach is applicable to a broader medical and allied health education spectrum, as well as other STEM and Social Sciences fields.