Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to spotlight the research output in the field of grey literature (GL) during the 13-year period between 2007 and 2019 as reflected in the Scopus database.

Design/methodology/approach

This study has used Scopus, an abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature, to collect data for the specified 13-year period. The sources, which had “grey literature” in their titles, were considered for the study and the period was from 2007 to 2019. The downloaded results were analysed using specific parameters. The SPSS and Excel have been used for analysing the retrieved data. The VOSviewer has been used for visualizing the network.

Findings

Scopus indexes different kinds of documents such as articles, books, chapters, conference papers, editorial, erratum, letters, notes, reviews and short surveys. There were 345 publications, which received 309 citations. GL-Conference Series: Conference Proceedings published the most number of articles. The majority 51.9 per cent of the articles were published in collaboration with authors from European countries. The term “grey literature” occurred most commonly as author keyword and index term.

Originality/value

The present study highlights how the area of GL has evolved during the 13-year period. The findings of the study pave the way for more detailed exploration of GL, which has relevance for the researchers.

中文翻译：

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灰色文献的文献计量研究（2007-2019）

目的

本文的目的是重点介绍Scopus数据库中反映的2007年至2019年这13年间灰色文献（GL）领域的研究成果。

设计/方法/方法

这项研究使用了Scopus（经过同行评审的文献的摘要和引文数据库）来收集指定13年期间的数据。研究中使用了标题为“灰色文献”的来源，研究时间为2007年至2019年。使用特定参数对下载的结果进行了分析。SPSS和Excel已用于分析检索到的数据。VOSviewer已用于可视化网络。

发现

Scopus对各种文档进行索引，例如文章，书籍，章节，会议论文，社论，勘误，信函，便笺，评论和简短调查。有345种出版物，被309次引用。GL会议系列：会议论文集发表最多的文章。大多数文章中有51.9％是与欧洲国家的作者合作出版的。“灰色文学”一词最常作为作者关键词和索引词出现。

创意/价值

本研究重点介绍了GL领域在13年期间的演变。该研究的发现为更详细地探索GL铺平了道路，这对研究人员具有重要意义。