Beyond Garfield’s Citation Index: an assessment of some issues in building a personal name Acknowledgments Index

A comprehensive analysis of acknowledgement texts in Web of Science: a case study on four scientific domains

Analysis of acknowledgments is particularly interesting as acknowledgments may give information not only about funding, but they are also able to reveal hidden contributions to authorship and the researcher’s collaboration patterns, context in which research was conducted, and specific aspects of the academic work. The focus of the present research is the analysis of a large sample of acknowledgement texts indexed in the Web of Science (WoS) Core Collection. Record types “article” and “review” from four different scientific domains, namely social sciences, economics, oceanography and computer science, published from 2014 to 2019 in a scientific journal in English were considered. Six types of acknowledged entities, i.e., funding agency, grant number, individuals, university, corporation and miscellaneous, were extracted from the acknowledgement texts using a named entity recognition tagger and subsequently examined. A general analysis of the acknowledgement texts showed that indexing of funding information in WoS is incomplete. The analysis of the automatically extracted entities revealed differences and distinct patterns in the distribution of acknowledged entities of different types between different scientific domains. A strong association was found between acknowledged entity and scientific domain, and acknowledged entity and entity type. Only negligible correlation was found between the number of citations and the number of acknowledged entities. Generally, the number of words in the acknowledgement texts positively correlates with the number of acknowledged funding organizations, universities, individuals and miscellaneous entities. At the same time, acknowledgement texts with the larger number of sentences have more acknowledged individuals and miscellaneous categories.

Dataset of identified scholars mentioned in acknowledgement statements

Acknowledgements represent scholars' relationships as part of the research contribution. While co-authors and citations are often provided as a well-formatted bibliometric database, acknowledged individuals are difficult to identify because they appear as part of the statements in the paper. We identify acknowledged scholars who appeared in papers published in open-access journals by referring to the co-author and citation relationships stored in the Microsoft Academic Graph (MAG). Therefore, the constructed dataset is compatible with MAG, which accelerates and expands the acknowledgements as a data source of scholarly relationships similar to collaboration and citation analysis. Moreover, the implemented code is publicly available; thus, it can be applied in other studies.

Knowledge management in local governments in developing countries: a systematic literature review

Purpose

The purpose of this study is to examine the state of research into knowledge management within local government in developing countries, to identify themes that have been studied and to identify important gaps in the literature that can inform a research agenda going forward.

Design/methodology/approach

A structured literature review method was used in this study. The authors reviewed academic literature published between 2009 and 2019. A total of 15 articles were identified and reviewed.

Findings

The findings reveal that, few authors have contributed to knowledge management within local government in developing countries and there is little international collaboration between authors. The authors found limited methodological and theoretical diversity and rigor in the reviewed work. The review identified themes that have been researched but evidenced a lack of guidelines and frameworks developed to promote knowledge management initiatives within local governments in developing countries. Overall, it was evident that this area was still little explored. As a result, there are many possibilities for future research.

Originality/value

This study provides a comprehensive systematic literature review of papers published on knowledge management in local governments in developing countries, identifying themes that have been studied and gaps for further research.

Acknowledgements are not just thank you notes: A qualitative analysis of acknowledgements content in scientific articles and reviews published in 2015

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.