Do you think there is a relationship between the content of acknowledgements presented in scientific publications and its subsequent success as reflected in citation rates? For instance, are articles without presenting acknowledgements more or less cited than articles presenting in the acknowledgements a long list of people? Any statistics on this?
Dear Dr. Marcel M. Lambrechts
The Acknowledgements section normally lists the contributors who do not comply with authorship criteria but providing means or points of view useful for the research or during the preparation of the manuscript (review, copy-editing prior to submission), or even institutions providing grants for research.
Nevertheless, your question could be also valid in a different sense. Acknowledgements, when including contributors names, also provides a sense of influence, and it has been started to be considered as part of scientific curriculum, and also to position researchers as experts in a given field. Maybe it would be of your interest for this matter the following paper:
Giles CL, Councill IG. Who gets acknowledged: measuring scientific contributions through automatic acknowledgment indexing. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA. 2004;101(51):17599-604.
I do not know of a bibliometric analysis in order to correlate it with citation, but it could be tricky, because not even finding a paper when searching for a contributor's name could determine the citation of the paper, more than the paper's scientific contribution to the given field of research.
With best regards
Ernesto Galbán Rodríguez
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