An acknowledgement index (
British English
British English (BrE, en-GB, or BE) is, according to Lexico, Oxford Dictionaries, "English language, English as used in Great Britain, as distinct from that used elsewhere". More narrowly, it can refer specifically to the English language in ...
spelling
) or acknowledgment index (
American English
American English, sometimes called United States English or U.S. English, is the set of variety (linguistics), varieties of the English language native to the United States. English is the Languages of the United States, most widely spoken lan ...
spelling
) is a
scientometric index which analyzes
acknowledgements in
scientific literature
: ''For a broader class of literature, see Academic publishing.''
Scientific literature comprises scholarly publications that report original empirical and theoretical work in the natural and social sciences. Within an academic field, scient ...
and attempts to quantify their impact. Typically, a scholarly article has a section in which the authors acknowledge entities such as funding, technical staff, colleagues, etc. that have contributed materials or knowledge or have influenced or inspired their work. Like a
citation index
A citation index is a kind of bibliographic index, an index of citations between publications, allowing the user to easily establish which later documents cite which earlier documents. A form of citation index is first found in 12th-century Hebr ...
, an acknowledgement index measures influences on scientific work, but in a different sense; it measures institutional and economic influences as well as informal influences of individual people, ideas, and artifacts.
Unlike the
impact factor
The impact factor (IF) or journal impact factor (JIF) of an academic journal is a scientometric index calculated by Clarivate that reflects the yearly mean number of citations of articles published in the last two years in a given journal, as i ...
, it does not produce a single overall metric, but analyses the components separately. However, the total number of acknowledgements to an acknowledged entity can be measured and so can the number of citations to the papers in which the acknowledgement appears. The ratio of this total number of citations to the total number of papers in which the acknowledge entity appears can be construed as the impact of that acknowledged entity.
The first automated acknowledgement indexing was created in the search engine and digital library,
CiteSeer
CiteSeerX (formerly called CiteSeer) is a public search engine and digital library for scientific and academic papers, primarily in the fields of computer and information science.
CiteSeer's goal is to improve the dissemination and access of ac ...
. However, that feature is no longer supported. Another acknowledgement extraction and indexing system for acknowledgement was AckSeer,
however, that indexing system is not available today as well.
See also
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Citation impact
Citation impact is a measure of how many times an academic journal article or book or author is cited by other articles, books or authors. Citation counts are interpreted as measures of the impact or influence of academic work and have given rise ...
*
CiteSeerX
CiteSeerX (formerly called CiteSeer) is a public search engine and digital library for scientific and academic papers, primarily in the fields of computer and information science.
CiteSeer's goal is to improve the dissemination and access of ac ...
*
Metascience
Metascience (also known as meta-research) is the use of scientific methodology to study science itself. Metascience seeks to increase the quality of scientific research while reducing inefficiency. It is also known as "''research on research''" ...
References
Citation indices
Reputation management
Academic publishing
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