A Terminology Based Re-Definition of Grey Literature

The conventionally accepted definition of Grey Literature, as Information produced and distributed by non-commercial publishing, does not take into consideration either the increasing availability of forms of grey knowledge, or the growing importance of computer-based encoding and management as the standard mode of creating and developing grey literature. Semi-automated terminological analysis of almost twenty years of terminological creativity in the proceedings of eleven GL International Conferences offers the opportunity to pave the way to a bottom-up redefinition of Grey Literature stemming from attested terminological creativity and lexical innovation. In this paper, we focus on a set of automatically-acquired terms obtained by subjecting our reference Corpus to a number of pre-processing steps of automated text analysis, such as concordances, frequency lists and lexical association scores. Acquired terms allow us to throw in sharp relief developing trends and important shifts of emphasis in the current understanding of the notion of Grey Literature.