An acknowledgement index (

British English British English (BrE, en-GB, or BE) is, according to Oxford Dictionaries, "English as used in Great Britain, as distinct from that used elsewhere". More narrowly, it can refer specifically to the English language in England, or, more broadl ...

spelling) or acknowledgment index (

American English American English, sometimes called United States English or U.S. English, is the set of varieties of the English language native to the United States. English is the most widely spoken language in the United States and in most circumstances ...

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, scie ...

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 Hebre ...

, 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 ...

, 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. 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.

References

Citation indices Reputation management Academic publishing {{library-stub

See also

References