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Acknowledgements are not just thank you notes: A qualitative analysis of acknowledgements content in scientific articles and reviews published in 2015

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  • Adèle Paul-Hus
  • Nadine Desrochers

Abstract

Acknowledgements in scientific articles can be described as miscellaneous, their content ranging from pre-formulated financial disclosure statements to personal testimonies of gratitude. To improve understanding of the context and various uses of expressions found in acknowledgements, this study analyses their content qualitatively. The most frequent noun phrases from a Web of Science acknowledgements corpus were analysed to generate 13 categories. When 3,754 acknowledgement sentences were manually coded into the categories, three distinct axes emerged: the contributions, the disclaimers, and the authorial voice. Acknowledgements constitute a space where authors can detail the division of labour within collaborators of a research project. Results also show the importance of disclaimers as part of the current scholarly communication apparatus, an aspect which was not highlighted by previous analyses and typologies of acknowledgements. Alongside formal disclaimers and acknowledgements of various contributions, there seems to remain a need for a more personal space where the authors can speak for themselves, in their own name, on matters they judge worth mentioning.

Suggested Citation

  • Adèle Paul-Hus & Nadine Desrochers, 2019. "Acknowledgements are not just thank you notes: A qualitative analysis of acknowledgements content in scientific articles and reviews published in 2015," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 14(12), pages 1-13, December.
    • Handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0226727
    DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0226727
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    1. Adrián A. Díaz-Faes & María Bordons, 2014. "Acknowledgments in scientific publications: Presence in Spanish science and text patterns across disciplines," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 65(9), pages 1834-1849, September.
    2. Rodrigo Costas & Thed N. van Leeuwen, 2012. "Approaching the “reward triangle”: General analysis of the presence of funding acknowledgments and “peer interactive communication” in scientific publications," Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 63(8), pages 1647-1661, August.
    3. Katherine W. McCain, 2018. "Beyond Garfield’s Citation Index: an assessment of some issues in building a personal name Acknowledgments Index," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 114(2), pages 605-631, February.
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    1. Alberto Baccini & Eugenio Petrovich, 2022. "Normative versus strategic accounts of acknowledgment data: The case of the top-five journals of economics," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 127(1), pages 603-635, January.
    2. Nina Smirnova & Philipp Mayr, 2023. "A comprehensive analysis of acknowledgement texts in Web of Science: a case study on four scientific domains," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 128(1), pages 709-734, January.

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