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Adèle Paul-Hus, Adrián A. Díaz-Faes, Maxime Sainte-Marie, Nadine Desrochers, Rodrigo Costas, Vincent Larivière

For the past 50 years, acknowledgments have been studied as important paratextual traces
of research practices, collaboration, and infrastructure in science. Since 2008, funding
acknowledgments have been indexed by Web of Science, supporting large-scale analyses
of research funding. Applying advanced linguistic methods as well as Correspondence Analysis
to more than one million acknowledgments from research articles and reviews published
in 2015, this paper aims to go beyond funding disclosure and study the main types of
contributions found in acknowledgments on a large scale and through disciplinary comparisons.
Our analysis shows that technical support is more frequently acknowledged by scholars
in Chemistry, Physics and Engineering. Earth and Space, Professional Fields, and
Social Sciences are more likely to acknowledge contributions from colleagues, editors, and
reviewers, while Biology acknowledgments put more emphasis on logistics and fieldworkrelated
tasks. Conflicts of interest disclosures (or lack of thereof) are more frequently found
in acknowledgments from Clinical Medicine, Health and, to a lesser extent, Psychology.
These results demonstrate that acknowledgment practices truly do vary across disciplines
and that this can lead to important further research beyond the sole interest in funding

Additional data

Year of publication 2017
Journal PLOS ONE
DOI https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0185578
Reference Adèle Paul-Hus, Adrián A. Díaz-Faes, Maxime Sainte-Marie, Nadine Desrochers, Rodrigo Costas, Vincent Larivière (), . PLOS ONE, 12, p. 1