The scientific outcome in the domain of grey literature: bibliometric mapping and visualisation using the R-bibliometrix package and the VOSviewer

Abstract

PurposeThe current study aims to map the scientific output of grey literature (GL) through bibliometric approaches.Design/methodology/approachThe source for data extraction is a comprehensive “indexing and abstracting” database, “Web of Science” (WOS). A lexical title search was applied to get the corpus of the study – a total of 4,599 articles were extracted for data analysis and visualisation. Further, the data were analysed by using the data analytical tools, R-studio and VOSViewer.FindingsThe findings showed that the “publications” have substantially grown up during the timeline. The most productive phase (2018–2021) resulted in 47% of articles. The prominent sources were PLOS One and NeuroImage. The highest number of papers were contributed by Haddaway and Kumar. The most relevant countries were the USA and UK.Practical implicationsThe study is useful for researchers interested in the GL research domain. The study helps to understand the evolution of the GL to provide research support further in this area.Originality/valueThe present study provides a new orientation to the scholarly output of the GL. The study is rigorous and all-inclusive based on analytical operations like the research networks, collaboration and visualisation. To the best of the authors' knowledge, this manuscript is original, and no similar works have been found with the research objectives included here.

The status of open access repositories in the field of technology: insights from OpenDOAR

“…Educational resources and open-access repositories can also include teaching materials, such as lectures, lesson plans and course materials. Grey literature includes reports, working papers and other publications that are not formally published or peer-reviewed but are still of interest to researchers (Wani and Ganaie, 2022). Table 4 highlighted that journal articles (3,005, 22.13%) are the main content type in OARs in the field of “technology” followed by thesis and dissertations (2,745, 20.22%), books, chapters and sections (1,680, 12.37%).…”

Editorial: Special selection on current bibliometrics and reviews

“…Regarding research trends, Wani and Ganaie (2024) conducted a bibliometric analysis and found the publication of gray literature, information produced outside of traditional publishing and distribution channels, has been increasing recently, with prominent sources like PLOS One…”

“…Regarding research trends, Wani and Ganaie (2024) conducted a bibliometric analysis and found the publication of gray literature, information produced outside of traditional publishing and distribution channels, has been increasing recently, with prominent sources like PLOS One and NeuroImage. Yan et al (2024) provide a systematic knowledge map for researchers in the field of research data management and found that collaboration between scholars and institutions is weak.…”

Editorial: Special selection on contemporary bibliometric analytics

“…Readers may be interested in some related articles on whether authors play fair or manipulate Google Scholar bibliometric indicators, such as h-index and i10-index (Loan and Shah, 2022), and the analysis of Sci-Hub use with Google Trends (Behboudi et al ., 2021); Chen et al . (2021) studied the effect of interdisciplinary components' citation intensity on scientific impact, whether proceedings papers in science fields have higher impacts than those in social science and humanities (Yang and Qi, 2021), characteristics analysis and evaluation of discourse leading for academic journals (Wang, 2022), the ecosystem of research tools for scholarly communication (Rao et al ., 2022), the scientific outcome in the domain of grey literature (Wani and Ganaie, 2022), early discovering highly cited academic papers (Tang et al ., 2023) and textbook citations (Maleki et al ., 2023).…”