Benefitting from the Grey Literature in Software Engineering Research

Abstract

Researchers generally place the most trust in peer-reviewed, published information, such as journals and conference papers. By contrast, software engineering (SE) practitioners typically do not have the time, access or expertise to review and benefit from such publications. As a result, practitioners are more likely to turn to other sources of information that they trust, e.g., trade magazines, online blog-posts, survey results or technical reports, collectively referred to as Grey Literature (GL). Furthermore, practitioners also share their ideas and experiences as GL, which can serve as a valuable data source for research. While GL itself is not a new topic in SE, using, benefitting and synthesizing knowledge from the GL in SE is a contemporary topic in empirical SE research and we are seeing that researchers are increasingly benefitting from the knowledge available within GL. The goal of this chapter is to provide an overview to GL in SE, together with insights on how SE researchers can effectively use and benefit from the knowledge and evidence available in the vast amount of GL.

Systematic Mapping Study on the Machine Learning Lifecycle

“…Hence, we argue that Opinion and Experience papers are also very important to the community of AI engineers. This is a concern being raised by the research community of empirical software engineering, which highlights grey literature as a valuable data source for research [18].…”

Practitioner Views on the Interrelation of Microservice APIs and Domain-Driven Design: A Grey Literature Study Based on Grounded Theory

“…In this paper we conducted a grounded theory study based on the grey literature [30]. We used formal modeling to precisely encode our findings (similar to [26]).…”

“…Grounded Theory (GT) [6], [7] is a systematic research method for 1 See also: https://microservice-api-patterns.org/ [8], [30] is the main data source in our work. In software engineering, grey literature can be defined as "any material about software engineering that is not formally peer-reviewed nor formally published" [30]. We decided to study grey literature sources representing acknowledged practitioners' views on the interrelation of distributed APIs and DDD.…”

Eliciting Best Practices for Collaboration with Computational Notebooks

“…Garousi et al [22][23][24] showed the benefits of complementing Systematic Literature Reviews (SLRs) with grey literature in software engineering research. Software engineering practitioners typically lack the time or expertise to access academic publications; thus, they mainly rely on grey literature to stay up to date and inform their work.…”