Page 35 - Becoming Metric Wise

24 Becoming Metric-Wise

E-print 5 electronic preprint
Gray literature: The Fourth International Conference on Gray
Literature (GL ‘99 Conference Program, 1999) defined gray literature as
follows: “That which is produced on all levels of government, academics, business
and industry in print and electronic formats, but which is not controlled by commer-
cial publishers.” Working papers, technical reports, theses, preprints, techni-
cal handbooks, and government documents are examples of gray literature.
Technical reports are a form of gray literature. A technical report can
be described as a document written by a researcher or group of research-
ers detailing the results of a project, often with the purpose to submit
it to the sponsor of that project (based on: http://libguides.gatech.edu/
c.php?g553991&p5348582).
Although technical reports are very heterogeneous they tend to pos-
sess the following characteristics:
• they are published before the corresponding journal literature, if they
end up in the formal literature at all;
• their content contains more technical details and jargon than the cor-
responding journal literature;
• technical reports are usually not peer reviewed;
• some reports may be classified or offer only restricted access.
Working papers: This is a term mostly used by economists and manage-
ment scientists to refer to a prepublication version of a manuscript. Their
departments often have numbered Working Paper Series. Working papers
are generally provided for discussion before they are formally submitted
for publication in a journal or an edited book.
In the context of research evaluation, one sometimes makes a distinc-
tion between citable publications and others. This distinction refers to the
issue of including this publication in the denominator of the calculation
of a journal impact factor or not (see Chapter 6: Journal Citation
Analysis). As this distinction is made by a commercial database and is, at
times, rather ad hoc it is better to make another distinction. White (2001)
uses the terminology reference-heavy articles (normal articles, reviews,
notes) and reference-light ones (editorials, letters to the editor, meeting
abstracts, book reviews). The term “Notes,” referring to short communi-
cations of a scientific character, has been removed from Thomson Reuters’
databases in 1997. Besides these, journals also publish errata, retractions,
corrections, updates, comments and author replies. Occasionally they may
re-publish articles of exceptional importance, often with new comments.
Most of these can be considered to be reference-light. Universities and