Who gets acknowledged: Measuring scientific contributions through automatic acknowledgment indexing

Acknowledgments in research publications, like citations, indicate influential contributions to scientific work. However, acknowledgments are different from citations; whereas citations are formal expressions of debt, acknowledgments are arguably more personal, singular, or private expressions of appreciation and contribution. Furthermore, many sources of research funding expect researchers to acknowledge any support that contributed to the published work. Just as citation indexing proved to be an important tool for evaluating research contributions, we argue that acknowledgments can be considered as a metric parallel to citations in the academic audit process. We have developed automated methods for acknowledgment extraction and analysis and show that combining acknowledgment analysis with citation indexing yields a measurable impact of the efficacy of various individuals as well as government, corporate, and university sponsors of scientific work.