To what extent 'Grey literature' is important to maintain the 'Transparency' & 'Rigor' of a systematic review. Looking forward for reliable and valid sources of information.
Including gray literature into systematic reviews is preferable and counted in the favor of the review. We performed a survey to show that 49.2% of reviewers search grey literature (Article Methodological steps used by authors of systematic reviews a...
However, we need to be more careful when dealing with grey literature to not add a low-quality work. So, we should adjust our inclusion and exclusion criteria to exclude bad-quality work that could bias our result or do that through trim and fill method in the meta-analysis and quality assessment.Usually, reviewers search for gray literature through SIGLE. Furthermore, conference abstracts could be a good grey source depending on the question of the systematic review.
Thanks Dr Ali Mahmoud Ahmed , In a nutshell you gave a brief and concise insight about welcoming grey literature in systematic review. Although, I want to be apart of that 49.2% of the reviewer that explore grey literature, but after careful pruning of low quality 'grey literature'. Thanks once again.
Looking forward for some more answers.
Cochrane's methodological expectation is that is highly desirable, but not mandatory, to search for grey literature (MECIR C28), and these are the main recommended sources (https://handbook-5-1.cochrane.org/chapter_6/6_2_1_8_grey_literature_databases.htm).
I would say the relevance of searching for grey literature is strongly associated with the topic of the review; unfortunately, it can be very hard to know what constitutes "low quality grey literature" from one area to the next.
Thanks Dr Daniela Gonçalves Bradley , I agreed with you that grey literature search is entirely dependent on the topic of the review. It's a struggle to identify and then discriminate the low and high quality grey literature during the course of the search?
Furthermore, I am also interested to know that if there exist a criteria regarding the number of grey literature that need to be considered while phrasing your systematic review?
Grazie
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