Reports & Gray literature

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Gray literature (Financial report, consultant’s report, NGO report, government report): How do I write the reference list entry?

What is “gray literature”?

Gray literature is “many kinds of reports, including government report, technical reports, and research reports. These reports […] usually cover original research, but they may or may not be peer reviewed” (APA, 2020, p. 329).

Source: American Psychological Association. (2020). Publication manual of the American Psychological Association (7th ed.). https://doi.org/10.1037/0000165-000

Examples

Individual people as authors

Krishnan, V., Mann, R., Seitzman, N., & Wittkamp, N. (2020, June 10). Hospitality and COVID-19: How long until ‘no vacancy’ for US hotels? McKinsey. https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/travel-logistics-and-infrastructure/our-insights/hospitality-and-covid-19-how-long-until-no-vacancy-for-us-hotels

Organization as author

Deloitte Consulting. (2016). The hotel of the future. https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/pages/consumer-business/articles/hotel-of-the-future.html

OECD. (2020). OECD tourism trends and policies 2020. https://doi.org/10.1787/6b47b985-en.

Author – WHO? If the author or authors are named individuals, use the family name followed by the initial letter of the first name. Use the ampersand “&” before the family name of the last author in the list. Check you have included the commas “,” and periods “.” in the correct place. Include the name of the publishing organization after the title of the report before the doi or weblink.

If the author is an organization, the name of the organization goes at the beginning of the entry and is not repeated after the title of the report, before the doi or weblink.

Date – WHEN? Write the year of publication of the article enclosed in parentheses (  ). Check you have included the period “.” in the correct place.

Title – WHAT? Write the title of the article in italics. Use sentence style capitalization, meaning the initial letter of the first word should be capitalized, following words should be lower case. If there is a period *.” or colon “:” in the title of the article, the initial letter of the following word should be capitalized. The names of people, countries and so on should have an initial capital letter. End the title with a period “.”.

Source – WHERE? Use the name of the publisher if it is different from the author of the report. Include the doi or weblink if appropriate. End the publisher information with a period “.”.

Corresponding in-text citation styles

Parenthetical citation:

The hospitality industry will expand by 3% (Krishnan et al., 2020).

Investment is rapidly needed (Deloitte Consulting, 2016).

Narrative citation:

Krishnan et al., (2020) predict that the hospitality industry will expand by 3%.

Deloitte Consulting (2016) demonstrate that investment is rapidly needed.

For more information, see

American Psychological Association. (2020). Publication manual of the American Psychological Association (7th ed.), pp.329-331, section 10.4.

American Psychological Association. (n.d). Report by a government agency references https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/references/examples/report-government-agency-references

American Psychological Association. (n.d). Report with individual authors references https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/references/examples/report-individual-authors-references