Also NOTE: I have found AckSeer! 

http://ackseer.ist.psu.edu/ 

This is not really common in mathematics, I think, and I see a problem with it, as there cannot be a simple way to automatically gather this information from a publication database. But why not contact your favorite journal publisher and ask if this can be done in some automated fashion?

Unfortunately I am not aware of any tool that would make it possible to do such a search in a systematic fashion, so basically one should just search for the surname of the person in question the databases like Google Scholar (or perhaps in some cases also PubMed, Scopus or other databases) that index full texts of the papers rather than just the abstracts and the reference lists, and then check the full texts to see whether the person in question is indeed acknowledged there.

1. You can search on google scholar or even google or any search engine.

2. You know which studies you contributed, you can search by searching the title if you know or by name if any author in the study and then look for acknowledgement in it.

As far as I acknowledgement do not help much in establishing research impact but it can be used as evidence of being familiar with specific methodology or intervention etc.

Thanks everyone for your comments.  Alwynne, thanks for confirming my suspicion that there isn't software or service that tracks acknowledgements.  

I would assume that a person acknowledged in a paper is aware of that acknowledgement; because of hu's contribution to that paper. I think it is rare to be acknowledged without being in any contact with the authors during the writing of the manuscript.  

There were attempts to gather the data with CiteSeer in the early 2000s by Giles and Councill (2004). They developed an algorithm to extract all of the acknowledgement data from the papers. 

There is mention of something called AckSeer, but I have not been able to actually track it down, so it is probably still under development. At present all I can seem to find are some conference proceedings about its creation.  (Khabsa, Treeratpituk &Giles, 2012)

Since then, funding acknowledgements are now indexed by certain databases, such as Web of Science. There are several limitations to this indexing however, as it only goes back to 2009, and only entries that mention some kind of funder are harvested by their algorithm (Costas & van Leeuwen, 2012). 

Robin, thanks for this info.  The last point takes us in a slightly different direction  (acknowledging funders rather than personal contributors to research), but given  findings like the recent ones by Michael R Kolber, Ben Vandermeer, G Michael Allan, "Funding May Influence Trial Results Examining Probiotics and Clostridium difficile Diarrhea Rates", being able to search acknowledgements becomes even more important

Article Funding May Influence Trial Results Examining Probiotics and...

Also NOTE: I have found AckSeer! 

http://ackseer.ist.psu.edu/ 

Sandy this is a very interesting piece that you have posted, and raises issues that require more scrutiny.

Something more on acknowledgements in research papers and how to track them. I was surprised when I have seen it in WIKI: "An acknowledgement index is a method for indexing and analyzing acknowledgements in the scientific literature and, thus, quantifies the impact of acknowledgement"!

Who gets acknowledged: Measuring scientific contributions through automatic acknowledgement indexing - fine article attached!

The next paper is last year paper Finding Science and Engineering Specific Data Set Usage or Funding Acknowledgements!

@Sandra, it is very good thread!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acknowledgment_index

http://www.pnas.org/content/101/51/17599.full

http://www.istl.org/13-summer/article1.html

That's an interesting idea, Venkata. Would you want the names of every single person and funding body below the list of authors?

Very interesting comments here and useful references. I think all contributors should be credited for their work - like is practice in the film industry. I pointed have presented this idea previously

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/231225109_It_is_time_for_full_disclosure_of_author_contributions

and I think it's just a matter of time before one of the social networks get the right implementation of it. The reasons for the lack of a decent record of contributions is multiple, one being the problems of making unique identifications of contributors. However, the new ORCID system will likely sort this out. Another reason might be that the social structure of science in some places is against it, since not all contributes so much as their publication record may indicate...

Article It is time for full disclosure of author contributions

I've just been looking into this for our Core Facility , (4 yrs after the initial posting) as we are looking at integrating a Facility management software with with a publications search engine. I've been using GoogleScholar for the last 3 years and find it about 98% accurat: it pulls up everything just by putting in the search term "your core facility name", and you can then get regularl alerts emailed to you when new articles appear, including online pre-publications with axccurate DOI's.

Where this method "errs" sometimes, is that acknowledgements occasionally end up in a pdf/supplementary article (generally Google finds these, but not always) and of course, somethmes authors don't ackowedge the Facility or staff.

PubMed purports to search acknowledgements, but its way more complicated, and seems (in my brief investigation) only to be a secondary filter applied via the Supplementary Concepts field:

Acknowledgements [ACK]

Includes all words in the acknowledgement section of an article (e.g., “National Institutes of Health[ack]”).

Anyhow, when Google Scholar does this so brilliantly, why would you bother with anything else..... ;-)

I think Google Scholar only does so if it has access to the full pdf somewhere. As i find papers that are behind a paywall to only sometimes show if someone is mentioned in the ACK.

This is why a separate metric, like the one from Publons, would be best here. We could have an identifier that is added to our name, similar to the ORCID number.