The countries selected for this directory were chosen according to the OECD List of Member Countries http://www.oecd.org/about/membersandpartners/list-oecd-member-countries.htm. The majority of grey literature material has been produced from these geographic zones, as well as serving as the country of origin of the majority of GreyNet community members. It was felt that this method would be a valid representative sample to work with. Further, as GreyNet is an international organization, it was decided that only materials produced in English would be included.
As the largest and most widely used search engine in existence, the search for material was conducted in Google using the following three search strings:
- ("grey literature" OR "gray literature") (libguide* OR "subject guide*" OR "research guide*") ([country name] OR site:[country code]
- ("grey literature" OR "gray literature") ~webinar* ([country name] OR site:[country code]
- ("grey literature" OR "gray literature") ~online (course* OR class*) ([country name] OR site:[country code]
The 2-letter codes of each country were determined according to WorldAtlas.com https://www.worldatlas.com/aatlas/ctycodes.htm.
Finally, due to the potentially large yield of results retrieved from a Google search, search results were limited to the first 100 hits from each search string. According to the Canadian Institutes of Health (CIHI) search methodology study, https://www.cihi.ca/en/cphi_upe_litsearch_method_en.pdf, the first 100 hits are, in general, deemed to be most relevant.