2. Structure of Chemical Information

Hi Andrey,

Thanks for bringing up the interesting questions. Here are some of my thoughts on this topic. I agree that the category "Gray" is as confusing as a category named Miscellaneous. With the new and emerging means of communication and "self-publishing", the Gray literature fields are even "grayer" than ever. Many of these new forms containing information very valuable and, more importantly, convenient to access for various audiences. We may be able to categorize some of them to the primary/secondary/tertiary literature (e.g. a technical report could be primary or tertiary resource) but we won't be able to do it with many of them. For example, a website like this one  is easily accessible and contains somewhat trustworthy data and information. However, it's original purpose was to test cheminformatics technology not to disseminate the information on green solvent and the attempt to articulate the provenance of the information is incomplete. So, I am not quite sure if I'd categorize it as a scholarly resource but I would also hesitate to tell students that they cannot use it at all since the information itself is helpful. In this case, the key is to let student recognize the major components missing here ( i.e. how these rankings of green solvent were determined and by who) and also recognize the needs to seek for additional resources beyond this one.

Going back to your original questions, we define the "Gray" literature as those ones "not formalized by the community". They can be easily accessible and open to the public as the example mentioned above but can also be very locked down like an expensive trade report. Although we can't define them strictly as common knowledge or scholarly resources, we cannot simply deny their usefulness and certainly cannot keep people from using them. What we can do is to help people evaluate these resources case by case and use them wisely. The community may reach a consensus on how a certain type of sources can be categorized when it's used more broadly but there will always be new types emerging for the community to figure out.

In terms of citing them, it's, again, case by case. Some existing styles like ACS Styles started to include some rules for them, such as citing some of them as a "Webpage". It's not ideal but at least it ensures people include the URL and access dates to meet the traceable requirements of citing. Citing new forms of information like Wikipedia pages as a web page may meet the traceable requirement but may not meet giving credit and lending validity requirements due to the vagueness of authorship in the first place. But the bottom line is that if people are using these resources in a deliberated and reasonable way, they should not avoid citing them. We and the research community will work together bit-by-bit to find better ways of citing and credit attribution while using them.

In all, "Gray" may not be the best container label but we always need a container for emerging resources. I often times get excited when students discuss these resource with me since that's when they would learn the true skills of evaluating and using a resource wisely instead of just looking for the affiliation of the authors to judge the validity of information.