Enticott 2018

Appraisal of: Enticott J, Buck K, Shawyer F. Finding “hard to find” literature on hard to find groups: A novel technique to search grey literature on refugees and asylum seekers. Int J Methods Psychiatr Res. 2018;27:e1580.


Reviewer(s): 

Monika Mierzwinski-Urban

Melissa Severn

Full Reference: 

Enticott J, Buck K, Shawyer F. Finding “hard to find” literature on hard to find groups: A novel technique to search grey literature on refugees and asylum seekers. Int J Methods Psychiatr

Res. 2018;27:e1580. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/mpr.1580

Short description: 

The authors describe a novel grey literature search technique, which was developed as a part of a systematic review search, related to health research with the focus on refugee and asylum seeker population. 

To identify additional high-quality research evidence related to refugee and asylum seeker populations, this novel grey literature search strategy aimed at searching targeted resources such as governmental health departments and statistical agencies (and other potentially relevant websites identified via these two resources) of countries that resettle refugees. These resources were selected because they have access to refugee and asylum seeker populations and the data collected is not usually published in bibliographic databases. This novel search technique retrieved additional eight publications that met the inclusion criteria. Out of the eight unique sources identified via the novel search technique, four were peer reviewed articles that were not retrieved during the initial database searches. The remaining four were high-quality, government reports.

The authors concluded that incorporating systematic grey literature searches (including targeted searches of potentially relevant sources) can be a great source of information in systematic reviews that may provide more complete view of the available evidence and may reduce publication bias.

Limitations stated by the author(s): 

Due to a limited allocated search time, the proposed novel grey literature search approach does not permit an exhaustive search of grey literature sources, which increases the possibility of not identifying all relevant information.

Limitations stated by the reviewer(s): 

The population of interest in this article focused on refugees and asylum seekers, therefore, it is not clear whether the recommended grey literature search approach would equally apply to other population groups or research areas.

Study Type: 

Single study

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