Approaching the “reward triangle”: General analysis of the presence of funding acknowledgments and “peer interactive communication” in scientific publications

Abstract

Understanding the role of acknowledgments given by researchers in their publications has been a recurrent challenge in the bibliometric field, but relatively unexplored until now. This study presents a general bibliometric analysis on the new “funding acknowledgment” (FA) information available in the Web of Science. All publications covered by the database in 2009 have been analyzed. The presence and length of the FA text, as well as the presence of “peer interactive communication” in the acknowledgments, are related to impact indicators, distribution of papers by fields, countries of the authors, and collaboration level of the papers. It is observed that publications with FAs present a higher impact as compared with publications without them. There are also differences across countries and disciplines in the share of publications with FAs and the acknowledgment of peer interactive communication. China is the country with the highest share of publications acknowledging funding, while the presence of FAs in the humanities and social sciences is very low compared to the more basic disciplines. The presence of peer interactive communication in acknowledgments can be linked to countries that have a strong scientific tradition and are incorporated in scientific networks. Peer interactive communication is also common in the fields of humanities and social sciences and can be linked to lower levels of co‐authorship. Observed patterns are explained and topics of future research are proposed.

Mapping the global mental health research funding system

“…Costas & van Leeuwen 2012). In addition to this, however, papers acknowledging support from a charity, foundation or non-profit had a higher citation impact on average than those acknowledging other sectors.…”

“…In the past this information has not been analysable at an aggregate level, but in 2008 Thomson Reuters began systematically extracting acknowledgements of research funding, making this data available in a specific field in the While our approach has many advantages, we also recognise that funding acknowledgement data is a relatively new tool for addressing the kinds of questions that form the basis of this study and that our understanding of strengths and flaws in the data is still evolving (e.g. Costas & van Leeuwen 2012). As a result, there remain uncertainties about the extent to which it can provide a reliable basis for this kind of exploration.…”

Data-driven Pattern Analysis of Acknowledgments in the Biomedical Domain

“…Their work is the very fi rst one to identify specifi c exchange of infl uence knowledge between countries and organizations using large-scale data on acknowledgment. Costas & Leeuwen (2012) utilized about 1,670,000 publications to depict how countries and disciplines are distributed in terms of funding acknowledgment. Along with the descriptive statistics result, the relationship between the presence of acknowledgment and impact, the relationship between the length of acknowledgment and the impact, and the relationship between acknowledgment and coauthorships were also explored.…”

“…However, even though acknowledgment delivers information about the intellectual influence between researchers, which is different from that of collaboration (Costas & Leeuwen, 2012), it is hard to find the works on networks built by considering acknowledgments of papers. Accordingly, we aim to identify the intellectual influences interchanged among authors, organizations, and countries using the acknowledgment networks ( Figure 2).…”

Tracking the performance of an R&D programme in the biomedical sciences

“…It also intends to offer a framework that allows research policy makers to track the effect of their strategies on research outcomes as well as how such efforts are perceived by researchers through their affiliation links. Do they acknowledge the CIBER infrastructure more often in highly cited papers as suggested elsewhere (Costas & van Leeuwen, 2012) or do they do it when collaborating with other research groups from their centre? Specifically, our purpose is to answer the following research questions:…”