In the creative arts and scientific literature, an acknowledgment (British English: acknowledgement[1]) is an expression of a gratitude for assistance in creating an original work.

Receiving credit by way of acknowledgment rather than authorship indicates that the person or organization did not have a direct hand in producing the work in question, but may have contributed funding, criticism, or encouragement to the author(s). Various schemes exist for classifying acknowledgments; Cronin et al.[2] give the following six categories:

  1. moral support
  2. financial support
  3. editorial support
  4. presentational support
  5. instrumental/technical support
  6. conceptual support, or peer interactive communication (PIC)

Apart from citation, which is not usually considered to be an acknowledgment, acknowledgment of conceptual support is widely considered to be the most important for identifying intellectual debt. Some acknowledgments of financial support, on the other hand, may simply be legal formalities imposed by the granting institution. Occasionally, bits of science humor can also be found in acknowledgments.[3]

There have been some attempts to extract bibliometric indices from the acknowledgments section (also called "acknowledgments paratext")[4] of research papers to evaluate the impact of the acknowledged individuals, sponsors and funding agencies.[5][6]

Spelling

The spelling acknowledgment is standard in American English and Canadian English.[1] However, the spelling acknowledgement is used in British English, Australian English, and other English-speaking regions.

See also

References

  1. ^ a b "Acknowledgement vs. Acknowledgment – Correct Spelling – Grammarist". Grammarist. September 22, 2012.
  2. ^ Cronin, Blaise; McKenzie, Gail; Stiffler, Michael (1992). "Patterns of acknowledgment". Journal of Documentation. 48 (2): 107–122. doi:10.1108/eb026893.
  3. ^ Wright, Glen (January 19, 2016). "The best academic acknowledgements ever". Times Higher Education. Archived from the original on January 19, 2016. Retrieved January 19, 2016.
  4. ^ Salager-Meyer, Françoise; Alcaraz Ariza, María Ángeles; Pabón Berbesí, Maryelis (2009). ""Backstage solidarity" in Spanish- and English-written medical research papers: Publication context and the acknowledgment paratext". Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology. 60 (2): 307–317. doi:10.1002/asi.20981.
  5. ^ Giles, C. L.; Councill, I. G. (December 15, 2004). "Who gets acknowledged: Measuring scientific contributions through automatic acknowledgment indexing" (PDF). Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 101 (51): 17599–17604. Bibcode:2004PNAS..10117599G. doi:10.1073/pnas.0407743101. PMC 539757. PMID 15601767.
  6. ^ Councill, Isaac G.; Giles, C. Lee; Han, Hui; Manavoglu, Eren (2005). "Automatic acknowledgement indexing: expanding the semantics of contribution in the CiteSeer digital library". Proceedings of the 3rd international conference on Knowledge capture. K-CAP '05. pp. 19–26. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.59.1661. doi:10.1145/1088622.1088627. ISBN 1-59593-163-5.
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