Who gets acknowledged: Measuring scientific contributions through automatic acknowledgment indexing
- School of Information Sciences and Technology, Pennsylvania State University, 311 IST Building, University Park, PA 16802
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Communicated by James N. Gray, Microsoft Corporation, San Francisco, CA, November 2, 2004 (received for review July 7, 2004)
Abstract
Acknowledgments in research publications, like citations, indicate influential contributions to scientific work. However, acknowledgments are different from citations; whereas citations are formal expressions of debt, acknowledgments are arguably more personal, singular, or private expressions of appreciation and contribution. Furthermore, many sources of research funding expect researchers to acknowledge any support that contributed to the published work. Just as citation indexing proved to be an important tool for evaluating research contributions, we argue that acknowledgments can be considered as a metric parallel to citations in the academic audit process. We have developed automated methods for acknowledgment extraction and analysis and show that combining acknowledgment analysis with citation indexing yields a measurable impact of the efficacy of various individuals as well as government, corporate, and university sponsors of scientific work.
Footnotes
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↵ * To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: giles{at}ist.psu.edu.
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Author contributions: C.L.G. designed research; I.G.C. performed research; I.G.C. contributed new reagents/analytic tools; C.L.G. and I.G.C. analyzed data; and C.L.G. and I.G.C. wrote the paper.
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Abbreviations: DBLP, Digital Bibliography and Library Project; PIC, peer interactive communication; SVM, support vector machine.
- Copyright © 2004, The National Academy of Sciences
