A Pathway for Assessing Grey Literature: Leveraging AI to Extract Conference Metadata and Organiser Information from Calls for Papers

Abstract

Despite its importance, grey literature, including Calls for Papers (CfPs), remains largely overlooked in Metascience and Scientometric analysis due to its unstructured, highly heterogeneous format, which traditional tools struggle to process at scale. However, Large Language Models now offer a pivotal opportunity to devise innovative tools for systematically harvesting and processing such data. In this paper, we introduce COCI, an AI-based framework that automates the extraction of granular, structured metadata from raw CfP text. COCI employs a multi-stage pipeline for entity extraction, followed by author disambiguation against OpenAlex and semantic mapping of topics and conference series. This process identifies key data points, including conference editions, geographic locations, and comprehensive lists of organisers, along with their specific roles and affiliations. By structuring this previously inaccessible information, COCI establishes a foundation for the systematic analysis of grey literature, enabling new research opportunities and shifting the scholarly focus towards non-publisher-based events.