Survey on Grey Literature in Evidence Syntheses on Environmental Health and Toxicology Topics
Dear all,
If you support evidence syntheses in environmental health or toxicology, please consider completing a 10-20 minute survey described below. The survey was designed by the Evidence-Based Toxicology Collaboration (https://www.ebtox.org/), which is affiliated with the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Responses are requested by March 9, 2026.
Survey Link:
https://warwick.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_etvsylkpSNBa4DA
Background:
Methodological recommendations for conducting evidence syntheses endorse searching for and integrating “grey literature” (i.e., reports published outside of traditional commercial publishing). However, it is unclear what exactly are considered to be the relevant types of grey literature or how evidence reviewers deal with them in practice.
Survey Scope:
The survey asks questions about what you consider to be “grey literature,” where you search for it, and how you deal with included grey literature in the evidence syntheses you support. We are interested in the views of individuals at all levels of experience, ages, genders, locations, and work setting.
Ethics:
This work is being conducted as part of the Evidence-Based Toxicology Collaboration, and the full protocol has been published open access and is available here: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/2833373X.2025.2548563.
Your participation is entirely voluntary. No physical or mental harms from participation are anticipated. You may withdraw at any time during completion of the survey without any negative consequences for you.
To protect your privacy, the “anonymize responses” option has been turned on in the survey to prevent the recording of IP addresses and location data. No contact information data will be collected.
This study has been reviewed by the Secretariat of the University of Oxford Medical Sciences Interdivisional Research Ethics Committee, which determined that ethics review was not required to conduct the proposed survey. Please contact Anna Mae Scott with any queries: anna.m.scott@warwick.ac.uk.
Study Team:
Anna Mae Scott, John Barbrook, Megan Riccardi, Kimberly Zaccaria, Milica Pavlovic, Kris Thayer, Malgorzata Lagisz, Robert Wright, Sebastian Hoffmann
Thank you,
Rob
Robert Wright, MLS
Basic Science Informationist
Welch Medical Library | Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions
rwrigh32@jhmi.edu