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Creating grey literature – best practice guidance for University of Glasgow staff

Scholarly grey literature can be an effective and highly impactful way of disseminating research findings, or communicating emerging ideas and policy concepts, to specific audiences. Ensuring the impact of such literature requires attention to its publication. This includes consideration of how the document is prepared and the manner in which it is eventually published.

When searching for grey literature, searches will look for basic information such as author, publication date or publishing body. Many will go further and look for reports for specific organisations or published in specific time periods or geographical areas.

Often, many grey literature works do not include essential bibliographic details. It is important that this information is included as this will allow the work to be attributed to its authors, citations will allow the work to be recognised as being produced by a particular organisation, and obtaining persistent identifiers, such as a DOI, will provide persistent links which can be shared and tracked to measure impact. Awareness of these factors plays a significant role in communicating the provenance of the work and helps to establish the work as reputable and therefore worthy of citing. Works that fail to observe basic publication conventions, such as a lack of bibliographic detail or a persistent, citable link, can cause reputational damage and lower impact.

Making your work more visible and easier to find will help increase its discovery, reuse, and its impact. Some of the factors mentioned above assist in promoting discovery. In order to improve in these areas, we recommend ensuring the guidance below is followed in the production of any scholarly grey literature.

Ensure authors/creators of the report/paper and their affiliations are all clearly stated on front page of the document. You should include ORCiD IDs where available.
Ensure the organisation or group that is responsible for the work is clearly stated. Avoid using logos to infer the organisation is responsible for the work.
Ensure the publisher of the work is clearly indicated.
If the work is the outcome a funded project, then make sure to include the funder and the grant award number on the work.
Ensure there is a clear publication date.
Where the work is part of a series, make sure this is clearly indicated with a clear title and understandable elements that will indicate there is a sequence of work, to allow the order of related works to be understood.
Where the work has an ISSN or ISBN, these should be clearly displayed, preferably at the front or back of the work, along with other bibliographic information.
Include a ‘cite as’ statement clearly within the work, normally as a footer on the first or second page. This ‘cite as’ statement should indicate how the brief would be cited and must include your DOI.
Contact the Enlighten Team research-enlighten@glasgow.ac.uk to request a persistent identifier (PID) for your work (a persistent link). The persistent identifier used will be a digital object identifier (DOI) and a DOI ensures its persistent identification and citation. The DOI will ensure formal citation of the work is more easily tracked in bibliometric and alternative metric tools.
State the copyright permissions for the work clearly on the first or last page of the document, as this ensures optimum attribution, reuse, dissemination. It is common to publish work under a Creative Commons license and increasingly expected by readers. Depending on how the content of the work was funded, there may also be grant requirements to publish your work under a form of Creative Commons license.
The most commonly used is a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) or Creative Commons Attribution Non-derivatives (CC-BY-ND), but others are available, license wording and logos that you can use are available from the Creative Commons website. Even if you do not wish to use a Creative Commons license, it is important you state clearly who the copyright of the work belongs to.

If you have any questions or would like any help with what information to add to your publication, please Contact the College Librarian Michelle.Ohara@glasgow.ac.uk for assistance.

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Creating grey literature – best practice guidance for University of Glasgow staff

Ensure authors/creators of the report/paper and their affiliations are all clearly stated on front page of the document. You should include ORCiD IDs where available.

Ensure the organisation or group that is responsible for the work is clearly stated. Avoid using logos to infer the organisation is responsible for the work.

Ensure the publisher of the work is clearly indicated.

If the work is the outcome a funded project, then make sure to include the funder and the grant award number on the work.

Ensure there is a clear publication date.

Where the work is part of a series, make sure this is clearly indicated with a clear title and understandable elements that will indicate there is a sequence of work, to allow the order of related works to be understood.

Where the work has an ISSN or ISBN, these should be clearly displayed, preferably at the front or back of the work, along with other bibliographic information.

Include a ‘cite as’ statement clearly within the work, normally as a footer on the first or second page. This ‘cite as’ statement should indicate how the brief would be cited and must include your DOI.