Partnership Engagement Grant Awarded to Philippe Mongeon and Rémi Toupin
How is grey literature about marine protection cited in policy documents and scholarly literature? Philippe Mongeon and Rémi Toupin have been awarded a Partnership Engagement Grant from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) for the project The mobilization of scientific expertise through grey literature: the case of GESAMP. With this grant, the research team will investigate the reach and visibility of reports produced by the Joint Group of Experts on the Scientific Aspects of Marine Environmental Protection), an advisory body to the UN on matters of marine environmental protection. This project is a partnership with GESAMP, the QSSLab, and the Environmental Information Use and Influence (EIUI) research group located at Dalhousie University.
A first study published in 2004 by MacDonald, Cordes, and Wells’, “Grey literature in the life of GESAMP, an international marine scientific advisory body”, provides an outline of what this research hopes to recreate with updated tools and bibliometric methodology. This analysis of GESAMP in grey literature illuminated the publication and diffusion of GESAMP reports. Expanding this project in the current context will be helpful for GESAMP as they align their work with the Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development and address current challenges identified in their working plan. This project will use bibliometric methods to measure the engagement of GESAMP with the scientific literature and the engagement with GESAMP reports and publications inside and outside the scientific realm, especially for policy-making.