| Citation |
Di Cesare R., Luzi D., & Ruggieri R, (2008). The impact of Grey Literature in the web environment: A citation analysis using Google Scholar. In: Ninth International Conference on Grey Literature - Grey Foundations in Information Landscape, House of the Province, Antwerp, Belgium 10-11 December 2007 vol. 9 (1), pp. 49-63. https://doi.org/10.26069/greynet-2020-000.247-gg
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| Abstract (English) | The use of Grey Literature (GL) has hitherto been studied on the basis of whether and to what extent GL documents had been cited in peer-reviewed conventional literature applying citation analysis techniques based on primary sources (i.e. bibliographic references of journal articles) >Alb2000, Dic2004@, or on the multisciplinary citation indexes produced by Thomson ISI, the Web of Science (WoS) [Pel2003, Cor2004].
More recently, other tracking citation systems have been developed, such as Scopus, Google Scholar (GS), Citeseer, and CrossRef. To some extent these have challenged the ISI monopoly over scientific evaluation of countries, institutions, groups and authors. Accordingly, many studies have begun to compare the different systems, particularly WoS, Scopus and GS >Bak2006, Jac 2005, Nor2005@, to reveal the citations they have in common and the discrepancies, both in terms of frequency and source. In the process, the limits of the individual systems have emerged. These include citation errors (typographical errors, nonstandard reference formats, parsing errors, etc.), as well as varying focus according to discipline and the varying document types used for tracking citation counts.
Our research concentrates principally on the latter aspect and aims to ascertain the impact of GL on the web environment. Consequently we chose to use GS that considers not only citations from peer-reviewed conventional journals, but also includes citations received by GL documents. Potentially, GS is the appropriate tool for illustrating the various changes underway in scholarly communication as it can reveal not only different electronic documents, predominantly GL documents, to be found in the assortment of institutional pages, open archives and repositories, but can also reveal their impact in terms of the citations made. Therefore, a secondary aim of this paper is to verify whether GS is an efficient tool to identify core papers as well as in tracking citations from different document types and whether it is able to represent the scholarly communication deriving from citations considering both GL and conventional literature. This is fundamental for GL, which is clearly an integral part of scholarly communication for numerous scientific disciplines, but still remains on the periphery of research evaluation activities.
The paper presents the results of a citation analysis with the aim of evaluating the use of GL through a comparison of the number of citations received by both GL and conventional documents. The analysis is carried out retrieving documents dealing with the topic population ageing, a “hot multidisciplinary topic”, which is studied under demographic, socio-economical or medical perspectives.
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