Guide to Sources for Finding Unpublished Research

This guide takes you through the tools and resources for finding research in progress and unpublished research in Paramedicine. 

What do we mean by unpublished?  

Typically we mean anything that is publicly available on the internet that isn't published formally in a journal article or conference proceedings.  By their nature these unpublications are varied but might include things like: 

• Preprints, work in progress or an early version of an article intended for publication that is made available for comment by interested researchers, 
• Presentations, posters, conference papers published on personal websites or research networks like ResearchGate or Mendeley,
• Theses and dissertations published on the web or through repositories.

Unpublished research can be harder to find a number of reasons.  There is no one place to look. You have to dig a little deeper.  The tools you can use o do this are covered in this Guide. Also, there isn't that much of it.  There are a number of reasons for this. Paramedic researchers are relatively few and widely dispersed geographically and across different organizations (academic and EMS/Ambulance Services).  Compared to similar areas Paramedic research is in the early stages of development.  To use an analogy, Paramedic research is till taxing up the runway while other areas are already up and flying. It's not impossible; it's just harder than in more established research areas.

Why would you want to look?

If you are wondering why you would want to search for unpublished material, there could be a number of reasons: 

• Completeness,  if you need to cover a complete topic including work in progress and projects and ideas that haven't made it to formal publication,
• Real- world examples and case studies, not every project or every implementation will make it to formal publication but may be reported informally as a presentation, theses or dissertation,
• Currency,  the lengthy publication process encourages researchers to find alternative routes to promote research in progress to share ideas and inform current practice. Typically this would be preprints but there are other informal methods such as copies of posters and presentations.