Acknowledgment (creative arts and sciences) explained

In the creative arts and scientific literature, an acknowledgment (British English: acknowledgement^[1]) is an expression of a gratitude for assistance in creating an original work.

Receiving credit by way of acknowledgment rather than authorship indicates that the person or organization did not have a direct hand in producing the work in question, but may have contributed funding, criticism, or encouragement to the author(s). Various schemes exist for classifying acknowledgments; Cronin et al.^[2] give the following six categories:

1. moral support
2. financial support
3. editorial support
4. presentational support
5. instrumental/technical support
6. conceptual support, or peer interactive communication (PIC)

Apart from citation, which is not usually considered to be an acknowledgment, acknowledgment of conceptual support is widely considered to be the most important for identifying intellectual debt. Some acknowledgments of financial support, on the other hand, may simply be legal formalities imposed by the granting institution. Occasionally, bits of science humor can also be found in acknowledgments.^[3]

There have been some attempts to extract bibliometric indices from the acknowledgments section (also called "acknowledgments paratext")^[4] of research papers to evaluate the impact of the acknowledged individuals, sponsors and funding agencies.^{[5] [6]}

Spelling

The spelling acknowledgment is standard in American English and Canadian English. However, the spelling acknowledgement is used in British English, Australian English, and other English-speaking regions.

See also

• Acknowledgment index
• Attribution (copyright)
• Billing (filmmaking)
• Byline
• Closing credits
• Credit (creative arts)
• Opening credits
• Possessory credit
• Signature block
• Title sequence
• WGA screenwriting credit system

Notes and References

1. Web site: Acknowledgement vs. Acknowledgment – Correct Spelling – Grammarist. Grammarist. September 22, 2012.
2. Cronin . Blaise . McKenzie . Gail . Stiffler . Michael . Patterns of acknowledgment . . 1992 . 48 . 2 . 107–122 . 10.1108/eb026893.
3. Web site: The best academic acknowledgements ever . Wright . Glen . January 19, 2016 . . https://web.archive.org/web/20160119122638/https://www.timeshighereducation.com/blog/best-academic-acknowledgements-ever . 2016-01-19 . January 19, 2016 . live.
4. Salager-Meyer . Françoise . Alcaraz Ariza . María Ángeles . Pabón Berbesí . Maryelis . "Backstage solidarity" in Spanish- and English-written medical research papers: Publication context and the acknowledgment paratext . . 2009 . 60 . 2 . 307–317 . 10.1002/asi.20981.
5. 10.1073/pnas.0407743101 . 15601767 . Who gets acknowledged: Measuring scientific contributions through automatic acknowledgment indexing . . 101 . 51 . 17599–17604 . December 15, 2004 . Giles . C. L. . Lee Giles . Councill . I. G. . 2004PNAS..10117599G . 539757 . free .
6. 10.1145/1088622.1088627 . Automatic acknowledgement indexing: expanding the semantics of contribution in the CiteSeer digital library . Proceedings of the 3rd international conference on Knowledge capture . K-CAP '05 . 19–26 . 2005 . Councill . Isaac G. . Giles . C. Lee . Lee Giles . Han . Hui . Manavoglu . Eren . 1-59593-163-5 . 10.1.1.59.1661.