Giles CL and Councill IG.. Who gets acknowledged: Measuring scientific contributions through automatic acknowledgment indexing. PNAS 101(51) p.17599-17604 December 21 2004

[Eugene Garfield]

C. LEE GILES : giles at ist.psu.edu

TITLE:     Who gets acknowledged: Measuring scientific contributions through
           automatic acknowledgment indexing (Article, English)

AUTHOR:    Giles, CL; Councill, IG

SOURCE:    PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED
           STATES OF AMERICA 101 (51). DEC 21 2004. p.17599-17604 NATL ACAD
           SCIENCES, WASHINGTON

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 indexingyields a measurable
impact of the efficacy of various individuals as well as government,
corporate, and university sponsors of scientific work.

AUTHOR ADDRESS: CL Giles, Penn State Univ, Sch Informat Sci & Technol, 311
IST Bldg, University Pk, PA 16802 USA