IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/spr/scient/v128y2023i11d10.1007_s11192-023-04828-w.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Exploring the correlation between acknowledgees’ contributions and their academic performance

Author

Listed:
  • Qing Xie

    (Shenzhen Polytechnic University)

  • Xinyuan Zhang

    (Zhengzhou University)

Abstract

Bibliometric analysis of acknowledgment has been expanding and has aroused the intense interest of academia. However, there is no scientific proof of the relationship between the academic performance of the acknowledgees and the acknowledged paper impact or the frequency of being acknowledged. Further, the disambiguation of the acknowledgees has rarely been discussed. In this study, 1,251,714 full-text papers from PubMed Central were collected, and We collected 82,367 acknowledgees with name and affiliation information from the acknowledgment section of these papers to obtain the possible Scopus author ID (candidate acknowledgee). In addition, 5692 acknowledgees were matched in the Scopus dataset to collect author performance indicators. Further, 1101 acknowledgees required name disambiguation because they had the same author name and affiliation name. Afterward, we identified 399 acknowledgees by considering the entities in the comments and references between the source-paper authors and acknowledgees. Additionally, we evaluated the correlation between the paper citation count and the acknowledgee performance indicators. The result shows that academic performance indicators positively correlate with the source paper citation count. However, there is an extremely weak correlation between academic performance indicators and acknowledgement frequency. Moreover, except for coauthor count, the h-index, citation count, and cited by count all show uptrends as the frequency of being acknowledged increases when depicting the distribution of the above-average values of academic performance indicator.

Suggested Citation

  • Qing Xie & Xinyuan Zhang, 2023. "Exploring the correlation between acknowledgees’ contributions and their academic performance," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 128(11), pages 6003-6027, November.
  • Handle: RePEc:spr:scient:v:128:y:2023:i:11:d:10.1007_s11192-023-04828-w
    DOI: 10.1007/s11192-023-04828-w
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11192-023-04828-w
    File Function: Abstract
    Download Restriction: Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1007/s11192-023-04828-w?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Bordons, María & Aparicio, Javier & González-Albo, Borja & Díaz-Faes, Adrián A., 2015. "The relationship between the research performance of scientists and their position in co-authorship networks in three fields," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 9(1), pages 135-144.
    2. Star X. Zhao & Wen Lou & Alice M. Tan & Shuang Yu, 2018. "Do funded papers attract more usage?," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 115(1), pages 153-168, April.
    3. Mike Thelwall & Kayvan Kousha & Mahshid Abdoli & Emma Stuart & Meiko Makita & Paul Wilson & Jonathan Levitt, 2023. "Why are coauthored academic articles more cited: Higher quality or larger audience?," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 74(7), pages 791-810, July.
    4. Min Song & Keun Young Kang & Tatsawan Timakum & Xinyuan Zhang, 2020. "Examining influential factors for acknowledgements classification using supervised learning," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 15(2), pages 1-21, February.
    5. Christian Pieter Hoffmann & Christoph Lutz & Miriam Meckel, 2016. "A relational altmetric? Network centrality on ResearchGate as an indicator of scientific impact," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 67(4), pages 765-775, April.
    6. Thomas Gurney & Edwin Horlings & Peter van den Besselaar, 2012. "Author disambiguation using multi-aspect similarity indicators," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 91(2), pages 435-449, May.
    7. 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.
    8. 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.
    9. Blaise Cronin & Gail McKenzie & Lourdes Rubio & Sherrill Weaver‐Wozniak, 1993. "Accounting for influence: Acknowledgments in contemporary sociology," Journal of the American Society for Information Science, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 44(7), pages 406-412, August.
    10. M. M. Kessler, 1963. "Bibliographic coupling between scientific papers," American Documentation, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 14(1), pages 10-25, January.
    11. Rose, Michael E. & Georg, Co-Pierre, 2021. "What 5,000 acknowledgements tell us about informal collaboration in financial economics," Research Policy, Elsevier, vol. 50(6).
    12. Abbasi, Alireza & Altmann, Jörn & Hossain, Liaquat, 2011. "Identifying the effects of co-authorship networks on the performance of scholars: A correlation and regression analysis of performance measures and social network analysis measures," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 5(4), pages 594-607.
    13. Grit Laudel, 2002. "What do we measure by co-authorships?," Research Evaluation, Oxford University Press, vol. 11(1), pages 3-15, April.
    14. Shanwu Tian & Xiurui Xu & Ping Li, 2021. "Acknowledgement network and citation count: the moderating role of collaboration network," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 126(9), pages 7837-7857, September.
    15. Jue Wang & Philip Shapira, 2015. "Is There a Relationship between Research Sponsorship and Publication Impact? An Analysis of Funding Acknowledgments in Nanotechnology Papers," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 10(2), pages 1-19, February.
    16. Blaise Cronin & Debora Shaw & Kathryn La Barre, 2003. "A cast of thousands: Coauthorship and subauthorship collaboration in the 20th century as manifested in the scholarly journal literature of psychology and philosophy," Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 54(9), pages 855-871, July.
    17. David N. Laband & Robert D. Tollison, 2000. "Intellectual Collaboration," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 108(3), pages 632-661, June.
    18. Saeed Roshani & Mohammad-Reza Bagherylooieh & Melika Mosleh & Mario Coccia, 2021. "What is the relationship between research funding and citation-based performance? A comparative analysis between critical disciplines," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 126(9), pages 7859-7874, September.
    19. Erjia Yan & Chaojiang Wu & Min Song, 2018. "The funding factor: a cross-disciplinary examination of the association between research funding and citation impact," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 115(1), pages 369-384, April.
    20. Melika Mosleh & Saeed Roshani & Mario Coccia, 2022. "Scientific laws of research funding to support citations and diffusion of knowledge in life science," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 127(4), pages 1931-1951, April.
    21. Blaise Cronin & Debora Shaw & Kathryn La Barre, 2004. "Visible, less visible, and invisible work: Patterns of collaboration in 20th century chemistry," Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 55(2), pages 160-168, January.
    22. Rodrigo Costas & Thed N. Leeuwen, 2012. "Approaching the “reward triangle”: General analysis of the presence of funding acknowledgments and “peer interactive communication” in scientific publications," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 63(8), pages 1647-1661, August.
    23. Adèle Paul-Hus & Nadine Desrochers & Rodrigo Costas, 2016. "Characterization, description, and considerations for the use of funding acknowledgement data in Web of Science," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 108(1), pages 167-182, July.
    24. Erjia Yan & Ying Ding, 2012. "Scholarly network similarities: How bibliographic coupling networks, citation networks, cocitation networks, topical networks, coauthorship networks, and coword networks relate to each other," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 63(7), pages 1313-1326, July.
    25. Erjia Yan & Ying Ding, 2012. "Scholarly network similarities: How bibliographic coupling networks, citation networks, cocitation networks, topical networks, coauthorship networks, and coword networks relate to each other," Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 63(7), pages 1313-1326, July.
    26. Paul-Hus, Adèle & Mongeon, Philippe & Sainte-Marie, Maxime & Larivière, Vincent, 2017. "The sum of it all: Revealing collaboration patterns by combining authorship and acknowledgements," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 11(1), pages 80-87.
    27. Martorell Cunil, Onofre & Otero González, Luis & Durán Santomil, Pablo & Mulet Forteza, Carlos, 2023. "How to accomplish a highly cited paper in the tourism, leisure and hospitality field," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 157(C).
    28. Jing Tu, 2019. "What connections lead to good scientific performance?," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 118(2), pages 587-604, February.
    29. 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.
    30. Bornmann, Lutz & Schier, Hermann & Marx, Werner & Daniel, Hans-Dieter, 2012. "What factors determine citation counts of publications in chemistry besides their quality?," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 6(1), pages 11-18.
    31. Loet Leydesdorff, 2007. "Betweenness centrality as an indicator of the interdisciplinarity of scientific journals," Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 58(9), pages 1303-1319, July.
    32. Qiuju Zhou & Loet Leydesdorff, 2016. "The normalization of occurrence and Co-occurrence matrices in bibliometrics using Cosine similarities and Ochiai coefficients," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 67(11), pages 2805-2814, November.
    33. 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.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Serhii Nazarovets, 2025. "Acknowledgments in scientific papers by Ukrainian researchers during the initial years of the Russo-Ukrainian war," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 130(2), pages 755-762, February.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    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. Katherine W. McCain, 2024. "Collaboration at the phylum level: coauthorship and acknowledgment patterns in the world of the water bears (phylum Tardigrada)," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 129(10), pages 6089-6125, October.
    3. Wen Lou & Jiangen He & Lingxin Zhang & Zhijie Zhu & Yongjun Zhu, 2023. "Support behind the scenes: the relationship between acknowledgement, coauthor, and citation in Nobel articles," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 128(10), pages 5767-5790, October.
    4. Adèle Paul-Hus & Adrián A Díaz-Faes & Maxime Sainte-Marie & Nadine Desrochers & Rodrigo Costas & Vincent Larivière, 2017. "Beyond funding: Acknowledgement patterns in biomedical, natural and social sciences," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 12(10), pages 1-14, October.
    5. Nadine Desrochers & Adèle Paul‐Hus & Jen Pecoskie, 2017. "Five decades of gratitude: A meta‐synthesis of acknowledgments research," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 68(12), pages 2821-2833, December.
    6. 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.
    7. Weishu Liu & Li Tang & Guangyuan Hu, 2020. "Funding information in Web of Science: an updated overview," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 122(3), pages 1509-1524, March.
    8. 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.
    9. Li, Heyang & Wu, Meijun & Wang, Yougui & Zeng, An, 2022. "Bibliographic coupling networks reveal the advantage of diversification in scientific projects," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 16(3).
    10. Nicola Grassano & Daniele Rotolo & Joshua Hutton & Frédérique Lang & Michael M. Hopkins, 2017. "Funding Data from Publication Acknowledgments: Coverage, Uses, and Limitations," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 68(4), pages 999-1017, April.
    11. Heo, Go Eun & Ko, Young Soo & Xie, Qing & Song, Min, 2023. "High acknowledgement index: Characterizing research supporters with factors of acknowledgement affecting paper citation counts," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 17(4).
    12. Shanwu Tian & Xiurui Xu & Ping Li, 2021. "Acknowledgement network and citation count: the moderating role of collaboration network," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 126(9), pages 7837-7857, September.
    13. Gianluca Fabiano & Andrea Marcellusi & Giampiero Favato, 2020. "Public–private contribution to biopharmaceutical discoveries: a bibliometric analysis of biomedical research in UK," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 124(1), pages 153-168, July.
    14. Belén Álvarez-Bornstein & Fernanda Morillo & María Bordons, 2017. "Funding acknowledgments in the Web of Science: completeness and accuracy of collected data," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 112(3), pages 1793-1812, September.
    15. Fernanda Morillo & Belén Álvarez-Bornstein, 2018. "How to automatically identify major research sponsors selecting keywords from the WoS Funding Agency field," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 117(3), pages 1755-1770, December.
    16. Min Song & Keun Young Kang & Tatsawan Timakum & Xinyuan Zhang, 2020. "Examining influential factors for acknowledgements classification using supervised learning," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 15(2), pages 1-21, February.
    17. Marian-Gabriel Hâncean & Matjaž Perc & Jürgen Lerner, 2021. "The coauthorship networks of the most productive European researchers," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 126(1), pages 201-224, January.
    18. Chen, Kaihua & Zhang, Yi & Fu, Xiaolan, 2019. "International research collaboration: An emerging domain of innovation studies?," Research Policy, Elsevier, vol. 48(1), pages 149-168.
    19. Pengfei Jia & Weixi Xie & Guangyao Zhang & Xianwen Wang, 2023. "Do reviewers get their deserved acknowledgments from the authors of manuscripts?," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 128(10), pages 5687-5703, October.
    20. Fernanda Morillo, 2019. "Collaboration and impact of research in different disciplines with international funding (from the EU and other foreign sources)," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 120(2), pages 807-823, August.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:scient:v:128:y:2023:i:11:d:10.1007_s11192-023-04828-w. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.