Support Behind the Scenes: The Relationship between Acknowledgement, Coauthor, and Citation in Nobel Articles

Abstract

Acknowledging individuals in research articles is known to be a personal and private expression of appreciation comparing to other types of acknowledgment, such as financial support. Early researches have demonstrated the significant relationship between acknowledgement, coauthor, and citation. Little did we know to what extent of these relationships and which prompt what to some degree among them. We adopt a series of multivariate analysis, Bayes’ theorem, statistical analysis, and “before and after” matched-group studies to illustrate the acknowledgement patterns in 6,323 research articles of 196 Nobel Prize laureates (NPL) from 2008 to 2018. Acknowledgment is consistently proved to significantly relate to co-authorship and citation where co-authorship and citing have an approximately 10% increasing effect on acknowledgement behavior. Our study is the first to state the order of such triangle: acknowledgement is significantly ahead of co-authorship and arguably occurs before citing behavior. Moreover, acknowledgement strengthens more than half of NPL on their co-authorship for 11% and citation for 72% after they acknowledge others. We verify the causal possibility of co-authorship and citing behavior from acknowledgement and introduce a formation of a new norm of scholarly communication. This will greatly contribute to the matter of evaluation metrics and social network detection.

Keywords: Acknowledgement, coauthor, citation, reward system, scholarly communication