PATTERNS OF ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/eb026893 |
| Pages | 107-122 |
| Date | 01 February 1992 |
| Published date | 01 February 1992 |
| Author | BLAISE CRONIN,GAIL MCKENZIE,MICHAEL STIFFLER |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Library & information science |
THE
Journal of Documentation
PATTERNS OF ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
BLAISE
CRONIN*,
GAIL MCKENZIE
and
MICHAEL
STIFFLER
School of Library and Information Science, Indiana University, Bloomington
Indiana 47405, USA
Personal acknowledgements are commonplace in the scholarly
communication process. The scale and significance of the
phenomenon vary from field to field, and from journal to journal.
Variation in practice is revealed in a twenty-year analysis of
acknowledgements in four of the top-ranked information/library
science journals
(1971-1990).
A
small number of individuals are highly
acknowledged; a majority are mentioned infrequently, if ever. The
concentration is similar to that found in citation analyses of research
productivity. There is a positive rank order correlation between
frequency of acknowledgement and citation frequency. The
implications for both institutional and individual evaluation are
discussed.
INTRODUCTION
MANY SCHOLARLY ARTICLES carry personal acknowledgements of
one kind or another, but there has been scant formal investigation of their
social and cognitive significance in the primary communication process.
Acknowledgements, like citations, with which they share certain textual and
functional features, can be looked at from a number of perspectives and
analysed in a variety of ways [1, 2]. They can operate as measures of trusted
assessorship [3], hidden influence [4] and credit or reward [1]; they can be
viewed as exchanges of gifts [5], as fixing or ordering devices, like synopses,
footnotes or references [6], as ritualistic appendages [2], or as expressions of
solidarity, characteristic of scholarly fields dominated by schools or organised
as mentor systems [6].
It is apparent that acknowledgements can operate on a number of levels.
*To whom all
correspondence should
be
addressed
Journal
of
Documentation,
vol.
48,
no.
2,
June
1992,
pp.
107-122
107
JOURNAL OF DOCUMENTATION vol. 48, no. 2
Functionally, they convey public gratitude for essentially private gestures of
assistance which contributed in some way to the research or scholarship being
reported. Symbolically, however, they may serve a wider purpose. In fields
which have a high degree of intellectual or ideological factionalism (e.g.
political philosophy, cultural anthropology, linguistics, literary criticism)
acknowledgements can be used to send out meta-messages, such
as:
'I belong
to this tribe', or 'I subscribe to this faith'. In a more general fashion,
acknowledgements can be employed, just like the star-studded bibliography
or reference list attached to a published article, to locate the author in a
particular social and cognitive milieu. In this case, the meta-message
is:
'look
at the company I'm keeping'.
And yet, little is known in a formal sense about either the functional
significance of acknowledgements or about acknowledgement behaviour and
distributional patterns within and between disciplines. Ben-Ari's [6] exegesis
was based on an analysis of approximately 200 ethnographies and on
discussions with mainly British and North American anthropologists, but did
not rely on formal data presentation and analysis. The present study seeks to
build upon a pilot analysis of acknowledgement practice in information
science
[2]
in order to develop a clearer sense of scale and variation within the
broader library and information science domain.
There have been two recent bibliometric studies of personal
acknowledgement patterns in scholarly communication. McCain scanned the
methods and materials and acknowledgements sections of
241
experimental
papers in the 1988 volume of
the
journal
Genetics,
while Cronin classified all
acknowledgements attached to research articles in
the
Journal of
the American
Society for
Information Science
for the period 1970 to mid-1990
[5,
2].
These
two studies appeared simultaneously in the literature and did not refer to one
another. An earlier, unpublished study by Mackintosh, which included a
typology of acknowledgements in the
American Sociological Review
[1],
was
not cited by McCain and was only discovered (and cited) by Cronin after his
original manuscript was submitted for publication. As a result, three separate
classification schemes have been developed in isolation (see Table
1).
Despite
TABLE 1. Classification schemes for acknowledgements
Mackintosh 72
Facilities
Access to data
Help of individuals
Cronin 91
Paymaster
Moral support
Dogsbody
Prime mover
Trusted assessor
McCain 91
Access to research-related
information
Access to unpublished
results/data
Peer interactive
communication
Technical assistance
Manuscript preparation
108
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