Abstract
Acknowledging individuals in research articles is known to be a personal and private expression of appreciation compared to other types of acknowledgment, such as financial support. Early studies have demonstrated the significant relationship between acknowledgement, coauthor, and citation. Little did we know to what extent of these relationships and which prompt what to some degree among them. We adopt a series of multivariate analyses, Bayes’ theorem, statistical analysis, and “before and after” matched-group studies to illustrate the acknowledgement patterns in 6323 research articles of 196 Nobel Prize laureates (NPL) from 2008 to 2018. Acknowledgment is consistently proved to significantly relate to co-authorship and citation where co-authorship and citing have an approximately 10% increasing effect on acknowledgement behavior. Our study is the first to state the order of such triangle: acknowledgement is significantly ahead of co-authorship and arguably occurs before citing behavior. Moreover, acknowledgement strengthens more than half of NPL on their co-authorship for 11% and citation for 72% after they acknowledge others. We verify the substantive possibility of co-authorship and citing behavior from acknowledgement and introduce a formation of a new norm of scholarly communication. This will greatly contribute to the matter of evaluation metrics and social network detection.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Vincent Larivière, Kevin Boyack, and Pei-Ying Chen for great suggestions and look forward to coauthoring with them in the foreseeable future. Based on our results, it is highly possible. Wen would like to thank the support of Shanghai Planning Office of Philosophy and Social Science Youth Project [Grant Number 2021ETQ002], and Jiangen He wishes to thank the support of the National Science Foundation [Grant Number 2122691].
Funding
This work was supported by the Shanghai Planning Office of Philosophy and Social Science Youth Project [grant number 2021ETQ002] to Wen Lou, the U.S. National Science Foundation [grant number 2122691] to Jiangen He, and the Yonsei University Research Fund of 2023 [grant number 2023-22-0070] to Yongjun Zhu.
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Lou, W., He, J., Zhang, L. et al. Support behind the scenes: the relationship between acknowledgement, coauthor, and citation in Nobel articles. Scientometrics 128, 5767–5790 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-023-04803-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-023-04803-5