Gray Literature - On The Typology of Grey Literature

On The Typology of Grey Literature

The term traditionally referred to reports, conference proceedings and doctoral theses. In the OpenSIGLE repository, reports are the most numerous among the different types of grey literature. The "reports" category covers a wide variety of very different documents: institutional reports, annual or activity reports, project or study reports, technical reports, reports published by ministries, laboratories or research teams, etc. Some are disseminated by national and international public bodies; others are confidential, protected, or disseminated to a restricted readership, such as technical reports from industrial R&D laboratories. Some are voluminous, with statistical appendices, while others are only a few pages in length.

In the other categories, citation analyses offer a wide range of grey resources. Besides theses and conference proceedings, they also include unpublished manuscripts, newsletters, recommendations and technical standards, patents, technical notes, product catalogs, data and statistics, presentations, malin-grey literature, personal communications, working papers, house journals, laboratory research books, preprints, academic courseware, lecture notes, and so on. The international network GreyNet maintains an online listing of document types.

The internet is altering the landscape, not only by changing user behaviour, but also, and especially, because more and more grey and malin-grey literature is being published on the Web. The internet has radically changed access and distribution methods, accentuating the ephemeral and volatile nature of grey literature, and is set to become the major area for grey literature research in the years ahead.