Beyond funding: Acknowledgement patterns in biomedical, natural and social sciences

PLoS One. 2017 Oct 4;12(10):e0185578. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0185578. eCollection 2017.

Abstract

For the past 50 years, acknowledgments have been studied as important paratextual traces of research practices, collaboration, and infrastructure in science. Since 2008, funding acknowledgments have been indexed by Web of Science, supporting large-scale analyses of research funding. Applying advanced linguistic methods as well as Correspondence Analysis to more than one million acknowledgments from research articles and reviews published in 2015, this paper aims to go beyond funding disclosure and study the main types of contributions found in acknowledgments on a large scale and through disciplinary comparisons. Our analysis shows that technical support is more frequently acknowledged by scholars in Chemistry, Physics and Engineering. Earth and Space, Professional Fields, and Social Sciences are more likely to acknowledge contributions from colleagues, editors, and reviewers, while Biology acknowledgments put more emphasis on logistics and fieldwork-related tasks. Conflicts of interest disclosures (or lack of thereof) are more frequently found in acknowledgments from Clinical Medicine, Health and, to a lesser extent, Psychology. These results demonstrate that acknowledgment practices truly do vary across disciplines and that this can lead to important further research beyond the sole interest in funding.

MeSH terms

  • Financial Support*
  • Science*

Grants and funding

Adèle Paul-Hus was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada: Joseph-Armand Bombardier CGS Doctoral Scholarships. Nadine Desrochers and Vincent Larivière acknowledge the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada: Insight Development Grant [grant number 430-2014-0617]. Rodrigo Costas acknowledges a grant by Department of Science and Technology, Republic of South Africa, Centre of Excellence in Scientometrics and STI Policy (SciSTIP). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.