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About the Gray Literature Database

Thousands of in-house reports produced annually by State and Federal agencies, tribes, and non-government organizations remain undiscovered by most researchers and fisheries management biolo­gists, primarily because the reports are not published and/or widely distributed outside the producing agency.

These “gray literature” reports contain valuable information on management assessments, fisheries surveys, research projects, human dimensions stud­ies, license and marketing efforts, and much more, including Sport Fish Restoration re­ports. Until now there has been no centralized online database that collects and makes available these fisheries reports.

The AFS Fisheries Gray Literature Database, available to all at no cost, allows rapid access to these reports from an easy-to-use central database, assuring the availability of substantial volumes of past and present work to fisheries scientists in North America and beyond.

Users can search the full text of submitted reports, as well as searching by author, title, organization, state/province, species, and year range. An exact match can be specified, and users may limit the search by logical operators (“and,” “or,” “and not”).

Search results (up to 100 records) are displayed showing the document title, authors, date, organization, species, region, and abstract snippet, with the user search terms highlighted in yellow. Clicking on a document title brings up the full-text PDF of the document which may be read, printed, or saved.

Questions or comments?  Please contact Interim AFS Publications Director Laura Hendee at [email protected] or 301-897-8616, ext. 227.

Funding for the development of this database was provided by the Sport Fish and Wildlife Restoration programs of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service under Grant Award F19AP00122.