Occupational Therapy

Grey Literature & Google

We have listed a few grey literature sources in your field to get you started including websites, gateways and more generally, tips to searching Google and Google Scholar. However, there could be many more useful and high-quality resources available.

Recommended websites

Government and Professional Bodies

Statistics

Australian statistics

Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS)
The most comprehensive source of Australian statistical information is published by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), Australia's official statistical organisation. Access to ABS publications including year books, time series data and tables, metadata, economic models, 1996 and 2001 Census Basic Community Profiles are provided online.

Health Status of Victorians
Includes information about the health and determinants of health of Victorians.

Australian Institute of Health and Welfare
Is the national agency for health and welfare statistics.

World statistics

World Development Indicators Online
World Bank describes the data as: "WDI Online offers the World Bank's comprehensive database on development data, covering more than 600 indicators, 208 countries, and 18 regional and income groups. The development data includes social, economic, financial, natural resources, and environmental indicators for more than forty years (1960 to 2004, where data are available).

Google and Google Scholar

Google and Google Scholar are particularly useful when searching for grey literature, e.g. organisational reports, working papers, government reports and information, statistics, conference papers, patents, blogs, webpages etc.

Google Scholar is a search engine for a variety of scholarly and grey literature - however Google Scholar has a broad scope, does not distinguish between peer-reviewed and non-peer reviewed sources and the algorithm can bias the results that are shown to you. Take a look at our evaluating information webpage to help you check the quality of resources. 

Asking the right questions in the right way

You can get the most out of search engines like Google and Google Scholar by asking your questions in the right way. You will usually find help pages, FAQs, or guides to searching on individual search engine homepages. But here are some common tips to keep in mind:

Try to keep your search queries simple

 

Carefully choose your keywords, and remember to think about alternate terms that could be used

 

If you need to search on a single term, make the term as specific as possible

 

Enclose "exact phrases" in quotation marks

 

Leave out common words, such as the, and, in and at

 

Search tools usually look for word variations, including single and plural terms e.g. Australia will match to Australian, Australia's, Australians etc.

 

Use domains to limit your search to material on specific websites, e.g. .gov.au for Australian government sites

 

For further information on searching Google, please check out our Searching the grey literature guide.