Can the impact of grey literature be assessed? An investigation of UK government publications cited by articles and books
Abstract
Grey literature encompasses a range of relatively informal textual outputs that are not indexed in citation databases. Although they are usually ignored in research evaluations, it is important to develop methods to assess their impact so that their contributions can be recognised, and successful types of grey literature can be encouraged. This article investigates the extent to which 97,150 UK government publications were cited by Scopus articles and Google Books during 2013-2017 in eleven broad subject areas. A method was used to semi-automatically extract citations to the UK government publications from articles and books with high recall and precision. The results showed that Scopus citations are more common than Google Books citations to UK government publications, especially for older documents, and for those in Healthcare, Education and Science. Since the difference is not huge, both may provide useful grey literature impact data.Citation
Bickley, M. S., Kousha, K. and Thelwall, M. (2019) Can the impact of grey literature be assessed? An investigation of UK government publications cited by articles and books, in Catalano, G., Daraio, C., Gregori, M., Moed, H. F. and Ruocco, G. (eds.) 17th International Conference on Scientometrics & Infometrics, ISSI2019: Proceedings, Volume II. Italy: International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics/Edizione Efesto, pp. 1801-1812.Additional Links
http://issi-society.org/proceedings/issi_2019/ISSI%202019%20-%20Proceedings%20VOLUME%20II.pdfType
Conference contributionLanguage
enISBN
9788833811185Collections
Except where otherwise noted, this item's license is described as https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/