The sum of it all: revealing collaboration patterns by combining authorship and acknowledgements

TL;DR

This study combines authorship and acknowledgements data to better understand collaboration patterns across disciplines, revealing that including acknowledgements reduces perceived disciplinary differences in team sizes and offers a more comprehensive view of research collaboration.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach by integrating acknowledgements with authorship data to analyze collaboration practices across disciplines.

Findings

Acknowledgements significantly complement co-authorship data in measuring collaboration.

Disciplinary differences in team sizes are less pronounced when acknowledgements are included.

Including acknowledgements provides a more accurate picture of collaborative research, especially in social sciences and humanities.

Abstract

Acknowledgments are one of many conventions by which researchers publicly bestow recognition towards individuals, organizations and institutions that contributed in some way to the work that led to publication. Combining data on both co-authors and acknowledged individuals, the present study analyses disciplinary differences in researchers credit attribution practices in collaborative context. Our results show that the important differences traditionally observed between disciplines in terms of team size are greatly reduced when acknowledgees are taken into account. Broadening the measurement of collaboration beyond co-authorship by including individuals credited in the acknowledgements allows for an assessment of collaboration practices and team work that might be closer to the reality of contemporary research, especially in the social sciences and humanities.