Accessibility Statement
Links to professional organisations for pharmacists in the UK. You will need to join for full access to content - but where relevant associations provide free access to guidelines or other material this has been stated. If the organisation you're looking for isn't linked here see the entry for the General Pharmaceutical Council.
These links may be useful if you can't access NICE clinical guidelines because you aren't in the UK. These sites provide links to alternative clinical guidance from other countries or organisations.
Grey Literature is the name given for documents of all kinds, produced by governments, academics, businesses and other organisations that have not been traditionally published.
The following is an indicative list of the types of publications this includes
Conference ProceedingsPanels, presentations and poster sessions given at a conference. May be collected and distributed as a single document - or available as individual sessions. |
White PapersA government report giving information or proposals on an issue. |
GuidelinesGuidelines produced by government bodies, professional bodies, charities or other organisations. |
ReportsReports relating to a single issue or investigation. Often available from the body making the report. |
DatasetsData collected by government bodies, organisations or individuals and made available for analysis by others. May or may not be connected to an existing report or publication. |
TrialsOngoing trials - or ones which haven't been reported in a journal or other traditional literature. |
PatentsPatents are a form of intellectual property right granted to an inventor. They can cover drugs & chemicals as well as medical devices and methods of production. |
Dissertations and ThesesStudent research - often available from university libraries or institutional repositories as well as Ethos. |
Grey Literature can often be difficult to find because it may not turn up in the standard search tools you are using.
If you know where a piece of grey literature was created, for example proceedings of a society conference, then it's a good idea to search there first. Most websites will have some search functionality, usually in the top right hand corner of the site. You can also use Google (see tab) to search a particular domain which can be useful for government documents.
There are many specialist search engines which cover grey literature in various disciplines. The following is a list of a few which are particularly useful for Pharmacy. If you are looking for Trials then see the Trials tab.
This is a handful of useful sources of grey literature for Pharmacy. There is also a reading list of sources which may be more useful if you are undertaking detailed research.
You should also consider emailing AldrichSAS@brighton.ac.uk and asking for help with your search. The subject team is happy to provide suggestions for resources, help with locating a particular source or 1-2-1 sessions on search methods & getting the most out of our resources.
Google can be incredibly useful when searching for grey literature just because of it's huge scope. This also means you can find yourself getting back a large number of results - many of which may not be useful.
There are a few things you can do to help refine the results you'll get back.
Use Google Scholar as a starting point (or Google Patents if relevant).
It searches a range of grey literature as well as conventionally published academic work. It has advanced search settings but you can also use the following operators (as well as all the standard boolean operators) to quickly limit a search.
| site: | limits the search to particular site or domain |
| author: | limits the search to works by a specific author |
| "quotation marks" | use to ensure that your results feature a particular phrase - really useful for titles! |
You can set Google Scholar to Findit@Brighton when you are off campus. This means it will directly link to our full text subscriptions - you won't have to go and search the catalogue for them ;-)
Go to Scholar Settings. Under Library links type in 'University of Brighton', check box in results and click Save.
You should now see Findit@Brighton as a link beside your results.