Acknowledgement trends in the research literature of information science
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/EUM0000000007089 |
| Published date | 01 June 2001 |
| Pages | 427-433 |
| Date | 01 June 2001 |
| Author | Blaise Cronin |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Library & information science |
RESEARCH BRIEF
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TRENDS IN THE RESEARCH LITERATURE
OF INFORMATION SCIENCE
BLAISE CRONIN
bcronin@indiana.edu
School of Library and Information Science, Indiana University
Bloomington, IN 47405, USA
Data were gathered on acknowledgements in five leading information
science journals for the years 1991–1999. The results were compared
with data from two earlier studies of the same journals. Analysis of
the aggregate data (1971–1999) confirms the general impression that
acknowledgement has become an institutionalised element of the
scholarly communication process, reflecting the growing cognitive
and structural complexity of contemporary research.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT AND ACADEMIC WRITING
Over the course of the last century, acknowledgements have become an integral
feature of scholarly texts (Bazerman, 1984, 1988). They, as citations, provide a
cumulating ledger of authors’ intellectual debts to their peers and sundry others
(Cronin, 1995). Unlike citations, acknowledgements cannot easily be aggregated
and mapped. We can only guess at the sociometric ley lines they etch on the
scholarly literature. At present, there is no equivalent of ISI’s (Institute for
Scientific Information) Web of Science for tracing and analysing acknowledge-
ments, though approaches have been proposed (Cronin & Weaver-Wozniak,
1993; Cronin, 2001a; Davenport & Cronin, in press). Quantitative analysis of
acknowledgements still requires manual effort, and our understanding of the
practice is necessarily incomplete, given the lack of readily available data.
Nevertheless, a number of domain-specific studies of acknowledgement trends
have been undertaken in recent decades. These have been reviewed by Cronin
(1995). In general, the data show that the rate of ‘sub-authorship collaboration,’
as evidenced in acknowledgement frequency, has been rising (Patel, 1973;
Heffner, 1979, 1981). This broad trend parallels, to some degree, the growth of
multiple authorship in almost all fields of scholarly endeavour. (See Cronin
(2001b) for a recent discussion of this phenomenon and related issues of
acknowledgement and ‘contributorship’ in biomedical and high energy physics
research.) Together, co-authorship and acknowledgement data provide a robust
indicator of collaboration and interdependence trends in science and scholarship.
However, while multiple authorship has been extensively analysed, acknowl-
edgement behaviour has been benignly neglected.
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Journal of Documentation, vol. 57, no. 3, May 2001, pp. 427–433
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