Gray Literature Versus Academic Literature in Software Engineering: A Call for Epistemological Analysis

Abstract

To learn about novel software engineering (SE) trends, where do you refer to? In order to document and disseminate their experience / knowledge, many SE practitioners prepare technical materials and share them online as blog posts, white papers and videos. Such materials are often called "grey literature" because they are not formally peer reviewed. By contrast, SE researchers write technical papers that are peer-reviewed and published as academic literature. We observe that, in general, these two communities mostly read literature that is only written by and published within their respective communities. This situation has led to a form of "knowledge divide" between the two communities that, we believe, hurts both communities. By characterizing and contrasting the two types of literature, grey and academic, we discuss how each literature can complement the other and can lead to a richer and more integrated knowledge exchange and dissemination in SE.

Science-Software Linkage: The Challenges of Traceability between Scientific Knowledge and Software Artifacts

“…Among them, there has been remarkable progress towards open access, especially the access to research papers and articles, due to its benefit to accelerate the research advances and the existence of open-access archive repositories such as arXiv. While such progress will no doubt narrow the knowledge divide between practitioners and researchers [1], it further reaffirms the need to access other scientific artifacts such as source code and poses the new challenges of creating and maintaining the traceability among scientific artifacts.…”

“…"Knowledge divide" is a term used by Garousi and Rainer in their recent IEEE Software article to describe how the communities of software engineering practitioners and researchers are generally divided in terms of their mindsets and objectives [1]. They delineated the contrast between the gray literature published by practitioners (e.g., blog posts, white papers, and videos) and scientific papers published by researchers.…”

How Should Software Engineering Secondary Studies Include Grey Material?

“…However, in various studies, Garousi et al have demonstrated that blog posts can contain opinions, ideas, and experiences of value to both practitioners and academics [42], [43], [16], [44]. Thus, there is a clear need to provide guidelines for searching and analysing social media posts.…”

Introduction to the Special Issue on: Grey Literature and Multivocal Literature Reviews (MLRs) in software engineering

“…However, we and many other researchers believe that insufficient effort has been made so far to utilize such knowledge in SE research. The encouraging news is that, recently, a number of SE researchers (e.g., the authros of the following studies [9][10][11][12][13]) have taken various steps in the direction of using GL in SE research. Also, we observe a recent and increasing trend of SE researchers benefitting from the knowledge available within GL.…”