Are there academic reasons to only use journal articles and books when writing? Recently I was researching for a paper, but the results of my research got me reflecting on my habits: 

Is is at all appropriate for me to use Google (partly also Google Scholar) for academic research, just because I have good experiences with it in my personal, non-professional environment? I noticed I feel slightly too comfortable in sourcing material via Google. As expected, the quality of the resulting materials is "bad", in the sense that the sources I happen to find are rarely journal articles and often chronically difficult to cite. Of course for many topics this is a non-issue, but for my current topic, a lot of government, international institution and NGO content was "on-topic" and needed, so that is how the situation came about in the first place.

While I definitely won't use Wikipedia or (online) newspapers, but I also came across e.g. OECD content: while the content itself is strong and academically valid, by now I sadly had to discard a significant part of it, also because I initially didn't (exclusively) use their "iLibrary". Specifically: The amount of time I had to spend trying to find e.g. the author of such non-journal content (and other source-data), trying to decide if I should invest my time into reading and citing the content vs. discarding it and that I have to enter bibliographic data by hand for such content make me tired.

Thus my thought is: Should I intentionally, sternly refrain/refuse to use (and of course cite) any materials that doesn't carry a DOI, ISBN or ISSN? There is still a lot of grey literature, manuscripts, working papers etc. and web content out there... My current frustration is so large that I seriously consider such a strict stance going forward, but I fear that I might miss out on crucial facts and that omitting such publication will affect the credibility and well-roundedness of my paper(s)?

In the age of Google I am very happy that academic standards are in place, compared to the lack of cite-ability etc. in documents published by NGO's, think tanks, policy institutes and some governments.
If you build your work upon other people's work, whether it be a blog post or postage stamp, then you should cite it, otherwise that's plagiarism. This is especially the case if the work is a primary source of the research (which can even be the case for blog posts). 

That said, there are some guidelines you can follow to get the best version of the work to cite.


Find the most recent or most authoritative/official version of the work. If the paper is an unpublished workshop paper, is there a corresponding conference or journal paper that was later published? Or is the work perhaps written up in a masters or PhD thesis?
Find the primary source. Is the blog post (secondary source) a distillation of some other paper (primary source)? If so, go for that primary source. Is the Wikipedia article (tertiary source) based on some well-known book or article (primary source)? If the report from an NGO is original research (primary source) then you should cite it. If not, determine what it is based on an cite that.