Can the impact of grey literature be assessed? An investigation of UK government publications cited by articles and books

Matthew S. Bickley (), Kayvan Kousha () and Michael Thelwall ()
Additional contact information
Matthew S. Bickley: University of Wolverhampton
Kayvan Kousha: University of Wolverhampton
Michael Thelwall: University of Wolverhampton

Scientometrics, 2020, vol. 125, issue 2, No 34, 1425-1444

Abstract: 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 the broad grey literature areas of Healthcare, Education and Science. Since the difference is not huge, both may provide useful grey literature impact data. Precision estimated in two separate ways for both methods appears to show acceptable levels of error for the automated method when compared to a sample with known citation counts.

Keywords: Grey literature; Grey literature impact; Citation analysis; UK government; Scopus search; Google books search (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11192-020-03628-w Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:scient:v:125:y:2020:i:2:d:10.1007_s11192-020-03628-w

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/11192

DOI: 10.1007/s11192-020-03628-w

Access Statistics for this article

Scientometrics is currently edited by Wolfgang Glänzel

More articles in Scientometrics from Springer, Akadémiai Kiadó
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().