ArticlePloS one2019
Acknowledgements are not just thank you notes: A qualitative analysis of acknowledgements content in scientific articles and reviews published in 2015.
Article in PloS one, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 10 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
10 citing papers in PubMed, 39 citations in OpenAlex.
- Informal connections outweigh coauthorship ties in academic impact.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Acknowledgment in the Scientific Literature: An Overlooked Record of Collaboration.Indian journal of psychological medicine · 2026Article
- Attribution of credit in acknowledgements: The case of systematic reviews in medicine.PloS one · 2026Article
- Beyond grateful.Nature chemistry · 2025Article
- What do the differences and commonalities in doctoral dissertation acknowledgments across disciplines reveal?PloS one · 2025Article
- Interdisciplinarity in cultural gerontology and geriatric medical humanities - a bibliometric survey.European geriatric medicine · 2024Article
- Publishers' and journals' instructions to authors on use of generative artificial intelligence in academic and scientific publishing: bibliometric analysis.BMJ (Clinical research ed.) · 2024Article
- Dataset of identified scholars mentioned in acknowledgement statements.Scientific data · 2022Article
- Taking histories: joint working of disciplines in medical history scholarship.Irish journal of medical science · 2021Observational
- A brief guide to the science and art of writing manuscripts in biomedicine.Journal of translational medicine · 2020Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Acknowledgements in scientific articles can be described as miscellaneous, their content ranging from pre-formulated financial disclosure statements to personal testimonies of gratitude. To improve understanding of the context and various uses of expressions found in acknowledgements, this study analyses their content qualitatively. The most frequent noun phrases from a Web of Science acknowledgements corpus were analysed to generate 13 categories. When 3,754 acknowledgement sentences were manually coded into the categories, three distinct axes emerged: the contributions, the disclaimers, and the authorial voice. Acknowledgements constitute a space where authors can detail the division of labour within collaborators of a research project. Results also show the importance of disclaimers as part of the current scholarly communication apparatus, an aspect which was not highlighted by previous analyses and typologies of acknowledgements. Alongside formal disclaimers and acknowledgements of various contributions, there seems to remain a need for a more personal space where the authors can speak for themselves, in their own name, on matters they judge worth mentioning.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.