Abstract
Two alternative accounts can be given of the information contained in the acknowledgments of academic publications. According to the mainstream normative account the acknowledgments serve to repay debts towards formal or informal collaborators. According to the strategic account, by contrast, the acknowledgments serve to increase the perceived quality of papers by associating the authors to influential scholars. The two accounts are assessed by analyzing the acknowledgments indexed in Web of Science of 1218 articles published in the “top-five journals” of economics for the years 2015–2019. The analysis is focused on six dimensions: (i) the style of acknowledging texts, (ii) the distribution of mentions, (iii) the identity of the most mentioned acknowledgees, (iv) the shares of highly and lowly mentioned acknowledgees, (v) the hierarchy of the acknowledgment network, and (vi) the correlation at a paper level between intellectual similarity, measured by common references, and social similarity, measured by common acknowledges. Results show that the normative and the strategic account should be considered as valid but partial explanations of acknowledging behavior. Hence, acknowledgments should be used with extreme caution for investigating collaboration practices and they should not be used to produce acknowledgments-based metrics of scholars for evaluative purposes.
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The Lorenz Curve (bold red line) shows the cumulative proportion of mentions received by the bottom x-percent of the population, against the line of perfect equality (thin black line). (Color figure online)
Clusters of scholars are organized in layers from left to right and identified by different colours. In Panel A, the dimension of a node and of its label are proportional to its weighted indegree, i.e., to the weighted number of acknowledgements received by a scholar. In Panel B the dimension of a node and its label are proportional to its outdegree, i.e., to the weighted number of acknowledgements a scholar has made in their works. In both panel links between cluster point from left to right, i.e., indicate acknowledgement from scholars on a cluster on the right to scholars on the left. The only exception is the purple clusters originating also symmetric links, i.e., acknowledgements toward other members of the purple clusters. Graph are drawn by using Pajek. VOSviewer (van Eck & Waltman, 2010) is used for the final layout. Only about a thousand of links are visualized to improve readability
Each node is a cluster coloured as in Fig. 2, the uppercase letter indicates the cluster, and the number corresponds to the number of scholars belonging to the cluster. Size of the nodes is proportional to weighted in-degree of the cluster, i.e., the weighted number of acknowledgements received by the scholars of the cluster. The arcs indicate the direction of the acknowledgements: the arcs are coloured according to the colour of the acknowledging clusters. The number near the arcs indicates the weighted number of acknowledgements generated from the scholars of a cluster toward the other cluster. For example, the red arcs pointing from cluster A to B indicates that scholars in clusters A mention 1230.7 times the scholars in cluster B. The figure is manually adapted starting from Fruchterman-Reingold algorithm by Gephi (Bastian et al., 2009)
The size of a node is proportional to its weighted indegree in the whole network, i.e., the (weighted) number of acknowledgements received. The figure is energized by ForceAtlas 2 algorithm by Gephi software
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Notes
Records were downloaded from Web of Science web interface in May 2020 using the standard University of Siena subscription. Research articles account for 96% of all documents published in the five journals in 2015–2019.
The acknowledgment string was extracted from the FT field of the bibliographic record, which contains the entire text of the acknowledgments.
The list was adapted from (Costas & Leeuwen, 2012) and included: “comment”, “suggestion”, “communication”, “discussion”, “reading”, “advice”, “insight”, “inspiration”, “inspiring”, “correspondence”, “feedback”, “intellectual debt”, “intellectual influence”, “conversation”, “remark”, “discussant”, “helpful”, “insightful”.
A lemma is the dictionary form of a word. In English, for example, “reads”, “read”, and “reading” share “read” as their common lemma. The lemma should not be confused with the stem, that is the part of the word that does not change when the word is morphologically inflected.
E.g., the acknowledgments of an article by an article by Ziv Hellman and John Yehuda Levy says: «Ziv Hellman acknowledges research support by Israel Science Foundation Grant 1626/18» (paper n° 194).
In 16 cases, the only “acknowledgees” mentioned were in fact the authors of the papers.
Similar results were obtained from the analysis of acknowledgments in philosophy, where, however, criticism was mentioned in 7% of the acknowledgments (see Petrovich, forthcoming).
The curve was calculated with R package ineq (https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=ineq).
The generalized distance correlation was calculated with R package energy https://github.com/mariarizzo/energy).
Pearson residuals are defined as:
$$r= \frac{{f}_{o}-{f}_{e}}{\sqrt{{f}_{e}}}$$where \({f}_{o}\) is the observed frequency and \({f}_{e}\) is the expected frequency under the null hypothesis of the Chi-squared test.
Similarly, Aagaard and colleagues (2021) note that funding may be over-represented «to boost apparent outcomes of grants and/or author reputations (by over-emphasizing or even spuriously naming prestigious funders) including when little or no relationship exists between acknowledged funding and the actual published research» (p. 9).
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Funding
The research is funded by the Italian Ministry of University, PRIN project: 2017MPXW98. A grant by the Institute For New Economic Thinking, New York Grant ID INO19-00023 is gratefully acknowledged. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
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Baccini, A., Petrovich, E. Normative versus strategic accounts of acknowledgment data: The case of the top-five journals of economics. Scientometrics 127, 603–635 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-021-04185-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-021-04185-6