Acknowledgments in scientific publications: Presence in Spanish science and text patterns across disciplines

Abstract

The acknowledgments in scientific publications are an important feature in the scholarly communication process. This research analyzes funding acknowledgment presence in scientific publications and introduces a novel approach for discovering text patterns by discipline in the acknowledgment section of papers. First, the presence of acknowledgments in 38,257 English‐language papers published by Spanish researchers in 2010 is studied by subject area on the basis of the funding acknowledgment information available in the Web of Science database. Funding acknowledgments are present in two thirds of Spanish articles, with significant differences by subject area, number of authors, impact factor of journals, and, in one specific area, basic/applied nature of research. Second, the existence of specific acknowledgment patterns in English‐language papers of Spanish researchers in 4 selected subject categories (cardiac and cardiovascular systems, economics, evolutionary biology, and statistics and probability) is explored through a combination of text mining and multivariate analyses. “Peer interactive communication” predominates in the more theoretical or social‐oriented fields (statistics and probability, economics), whereas the recognition of technical assistance is more common in experimental research (evolutionary biology), and the mention of potential conflicts of interest emerges forcefully in the clinical field (cardiac and cardiovascular systems). The systematic inclusion of structured data about acknowledgments in journal articles and bibliographic databases would have a positive impact on the study of collaboration practices in science.

Funding Data from Publication Acknowledgments: Coverage, Uses, and Limitations

“…Publications in economics, social sciences, and humanities and arts reported funding in even fewer cases, typically less than 10%. Similar patterns were found by Díaz‐Faes and Bordons () on a sample of approximately 40,000 publications published in 2010 by Spanish researchers. On the one hand, these figures highlight differences in the funding required to undertake research (e.g., between humanities and natural sciences), but, on the other hand, differences may also reflect norms of reporting at different times and in different places.…”

“…For this reason, research on the use of acknowledgment funding data for large‐scale bibliometric analyses was limited until, in more recent years, a new wave of studies has emerged with much higher sample sizes (e.g., Costas & van Leeuwen, ; Díaz‐Faes & Bordons, ; Gök et al, ; Shapira & Wang, ). These studies have mostly been facilitated by the increasing availability of ready‐classified information.…”

Public–private interactions reflected through the funding acknowledgements

“…On the one hand, variations between areas in terms of presence of FA were detected, as previously pointed by Díaz-Faes and Bordons (2014). Nevertheless, percentages of articles with FA differed from those found in that work, although, the distribution was almost the same, except for Multidisciplinary Sciences that ranked first, when considering the wider period analysed in this paper.…”

Funding ratios in social science: the perspective of countries/territories level and comparison with natural sciences

“…In recent years, with the development of bibliographic database for recording the funding information, numerous funded articles lead to an interesting aggregative level in scientometrics. Most previous studies can be divided into two main categories: (A) Fundamental analysis methods and indicators, such as innovative analytical frameworks of acknowledge information (Costas and van Leeuwen 2012;Diaz-Faes and Bordons 2014;Shapira and Wang 2010), h-index of research funding (Zhao et al 2009) and concise input-output measure (Zhao and Ye 2011); (B) The empirical investigations in a specific subject or aggregative level, for instance, the funded nano research (Wang and Shapira 2011), funded collaborations in mathematics (Zhou and Tian 2014), the feature of funded SCI articles of Iran (Jowkar et al 2011), funding analysis of SCI articles at the country level (Wang et al 2012) and the funded collaboration network of countries/territories (Tan et al 2012b). These studies mainly deal with the research articles in natural sciences.…”