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Funding acknowledgments in the Web of Science: completeness and accuracy of collected data

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Abstract

The study of acknowledgments as a source of data on research funding is gaining ground in science, as exemplified by the present inclusion of this information in bibliographic databases such as Web of Science (WoS). The objective of this paper is to explore the completeness and accuracy of WoS in extracting and processing funding acknowledgment data. With this purpose, a random sample of articles published in eight thematic areas and selected from the scientific output of Spain in 2014 are analyzed. Funding information that appears in original articles is recorded by WoS in the “funding text” field, but is also extracted to the “funding agency” and “grant number” subfields. In the extraction process, some funding information was lost in 12% of the articles and the distribution of agencies and grant numbers by subfield was not always consistent. In addition, funding support is often incompletely reported by authors: in about half of the articles we studied, the country of origin of the funder or the grant number(s) were not mentioned. We propose and discuss the need to develop more detailed guidelines on how to acknowledge funding. More accurate documentation of funding sources in published articles would benefit researchers, funders and journals, and enhance the reliability and usefulness of studies on funding acknowledgments.

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Notes

  1. Funding information is captured if it is mentioned in the acknowledgment section of the article and if the funding body is included in the FundRef ontology: http://www.crossref.org/fundref/.

  2. Information provided by Thomson Reuters (now Clarivate Analytics) Technical Support Unit (October 2015).

  3. The detailed classification scheme is available in Bordons et al. (2016).

  4. Articles and reviews, hereafter referred to as “articles”.

  5. There is some overlap between categories because grants that were entirely and partially lost may coexist in a given article.

  6. ANR stands for L'Agence Nationale de la Recherche in France; MIUR stands for the Ministero dell'Istruzione, dell'Università e della Ricerca in Italy; MICINN stands for the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación in Spain.

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Acknowledgements

This research is supported by the Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (MINECO), Spain (research project CSO2014-57826-P and predoctoral contract BES-2015-073537). We are grateful to Adrián Arias for his contribution in the design of the sample of articles analyzed here, to the ACUTE team for its support in processing data and to K. Shashok for improving the use of English in the manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Science, Technology and Society Department, IFS, Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), Albasanz, 26-28, 28037, Madrid, Spain

    Belén Álvarez-Bornstein, Fernanda Morillo & María Bordons

  2. Library and Information Science Department, Faculty of Library and Information Sciences, Complutense University (UCM), Santisima Trinidad 37, 28010, Madrid, Spain

    Belén Álvarez-Bornstein

Authors
  1. Belén Álvarez-Bornstein
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  2. Fernanda Morillo
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  3. María Bordons
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Correspondence to Belén Álvarez-Bornstein.

Appendix

Appendix

See Table 4.

Table 4 Distribution of articles and funders by thematic area
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Álvarez-Bornstein, B., Morillo, F. & Bordons, M. Funding acknowledgments in the Web of Science: completeness and accuracy of collected data. Scientometrics 112, 1793–1812 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-017-2453-4

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