We chronicle the use of acknowledgments in 20th‐century scholarship by analyzing and classifying more than 4,500 specimens covering a 100‐year period. Our results show that the intensity of acknowledgment varies by discipline, reflecting differences in prevailing sociocognitive structures and work practices. We demonstrate that the acknowledgment has gradually established itself as a constitutive element of academic writing, one that provides a revealing insight into the nature and extent of subauthorship collaboration. Complementary data on rates of coauthorship are also presented to highlight the growing importance of collaboration and the increasing division of labor in contemporary research and scholarship.

We chronicle the use of acknowledgments in 20th century chemistry by analyzing and classifying over 2,000 specimens covering a 100-year period. Our results show that acknowledgment has gradually established itself as a constitutive element of academic writing-one that provides a revealing insight into the structural nature of subauthorship collaboration in science. Complementary data on rates of coauthorship are also presented to highlight the growing importance of teamwork and the increasing division of labor in contemporary chemistry. The results of this study are compared with the findings of a parallel study of collaboration in both the social sciences and the humanities.

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