Grey communities - A empirical study on databases and repositories
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00:00
Computer animation
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:07
Hi, my name is Joachim Schöpfer, I am associate professor of information communication science at the University of Lille in France.
00:22
Today I will present a paper that we published more than 10 years ago. The paper of a study we presented in 2012 at the international conference of GRENET International
00:50
in Rome, Italy. So it was an empirical study on databases and repositories. We wanted to know who was working on grey literature.
01:10
It was a scientific study. The overall purpose was the kind of marketing.
01:21
We wanted to know how to develop our activity in GRENET International. So we had to look on databases and repositories and I will tell you what we did.
01:44
Some of our questions are presented here. Where is the boundary between inside and outside of the GRENET International community? Who uses grey literature as an object of research and publication? Who works on documents belonging to grey literature without applying the term grey literature?
02:05
So what we did, we made some queries in databases listed as corpus web of science, French database Pascal-Francis ELIS. We looked for published papers between 2000 and 2012.
02:26
Grey literature or variants of grey literature also with American writing. Entitled abstract or keyword fields not in the full text but only entitled abstract keyword fields.
02:41
We also added, just to have an idea, we added a query on studies on PhD thesis and master dissertation. We could have gone further papers on reports, on conference proceedings, working papers and so we didn't.
03:07
It was just exploratory and limited to PhD thesis and master dissertation. And then we enriched our data with some information about authors.
03:24
We were interested not in the content of the publications but on who was at the origin of the paper.
03:41
So we were looking for a profession of authors, types of institutions and some characteristics. We were mostly interested in the author and their institutions. So it was a systematic review at the end.
04:07
We had nearly 2,500 references, 30% were indexed in the web of science and Scopus,
04:23
50%, half of the references contained grey literature and the title keywords abstract. The other were about thesis dissertations and so on. And yes, there was one part clearly identified as scientific studies review, systematic reviews
04:55
and others mentioned PhD master thesis in the metadata.
05:04
So as a research, the query and database, it is not surprising that most of the publications were articles. One-third, 30% were very recent at that time, the last three years, 2010, 2012 in press.
05:34
And we listed the most important, most relevant journals for all these publication papers,
05:48
Publishing Research Quarterly, Archaeology, Medical Library Association and so on.
06:04
Two of them, you can see a Medical Library Association and Archaeology, are from specific communities, specific disciplines, Archaeology, Medicine. So the authors, we identified more than 5,000 authors, most of them 9 out of 10,
06:32
signed only one paper, and then we had to look on a selection of authors who had published more than two papers,
06:49
at least three or more. And with at least one of the papers which mentioned grey literature and the title of this, at the end we had more than 400 authors, probably a little bit less than 10% of the whole sample.
07:09
And we had to look on these authors which were relevant authors for our purpose. The purpose, as I already said, was to have some ideas, some perspectives for the development of our network.
07:30
So most of them, it's not surprising, from Europe and North America, but there were authors from all continents.
07:42
So it's important, it's not limited to one region or two people interested in grey literature and publishing about grey literature in all continents. Most of them in higher education and research, but also from other sectors,
08:06
but higher education, university of course, most important, and research organizations. Scientific domains, not surprising, not so surprising. Medical science, because there are many reviews in medical science,
08:21
and they are interested in grey literature as one source of information. Then library information science, not surprising, because the concept of grey literature comes from this sector, and then the other less important, social science, humanities, environment, and so on.
08:48
Most important, medical science, library information science. Medical science, because they need grey literature for their reviews on medical topics.
09:01
And library information science, because this is an issue of librarians, academic librarians mostly, but also other librarians. They are interested in grey literature because it's part of their holdings, it's part of their acquisition, you know.
09:26
So, this is exactly the other side of what I just explained. Many scholars like me, scientists, interested in doing research and looking for relevant literature
09:48
and using grey literature, and librarians and then some others. Most authors are either scientists using grey literature as one valuable source of information,
10:07
and librarians dealing with grey literature as part of their work. We had to look on authors which were not part of the greynet community,
10:30
and as you can see, we identified them all around, not only in Europe and North America, but also in the global south.
10:50
And as you can see, the BRICS country, China, India, South Africa, Brazil, apart, Russia not,
11:02
Australia, yes, and Nigeria, Venezuela, Mexico. So, there is potential for development here. And at the end, we made some suggestions based on this, yes, it's a kind of database of relevant authors.
11:36
We made some suggestions how to inform them of the work done by greynet,
11:54
inform them about events, conferences, the journal and so on.
12:01
So, Proximity, the author who mentioned grey literature, and they had information of the paper, librarians, other professionals from library, scientists from library information science, authors of recently published papers. This is a kind of a group of people outside of greynet, but near to greynet,
12:29
and within the first circle, the first target, if you want, of development.
12:41
Then the second target would be exploration beyond this first group, for instance in BRICS countries, other libraries with specific collections, communities like NDLTD working with specific types of grey literature,
13:07
NDLTD is about electronic theses and dissertations. This would be a second target of information. And then beyond the community, we suggested to create a LinkedIn group
13:28
to publish on grey literature in other domains outside of medicine, library information science, and why not to foster joint research
13:44
and projects between professionals, librarians and academics. This is what we suggested.
14:04
There was a database at that time with all these people, and based on the discussion at the conference, based on discussion of the internal of greynet,
14:23
we did some of our suggestions, especially the LinkedIn group. A little bit later, what we did was a kind of complementary study,
14:46
not on people at that time, but on the content. We didn't look on who was writing about grey literature,
15:00
but what was the content, what was the definition, how it was used, this concept of grey literature, but it was presented at another conference and it's an object of another paper.
15:21
So I will stop for this time. Thank you for your attention. Goodbye.