Acknowledgment index
Encyclopedia
An acknowledgment index is a method for indexing
and analyzing acknowledgements in the scientific literature
and, thus, quantifies the impact of acknowledgments
. Typically, a scholarly article has a section where 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
it 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
, 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.
Bibliographic index
A bibliographic index is a bibliography, an aid to search the literature of, for example, an academic field or discipline , to works of a specific literary form or published in a specific format , or to the analyzed contents of a serial publication...
and analyzing acknowledgements in the scientific literature
Scientific literature
Scientific literature comprises scientific publications that report original empirical and theoretical work in the natural and social sciences, and within a scientific field is often abbreviated as the literature. Academic publishing is the process of placing the results of one's research into the...
and, thus, quantifies the impact of acknowledgments
Acknowledgment (creative arts)
In the creative arts and scientific literature, an acknowledgment is an expression of gratitude for assistance in creating a literary or artistic work....
. Typically, a scholarly article has a section where 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
Citation index
A citation index is a kind of bibliographic database, an index of citations between publications, allowing the user to easily establish which later documents cite which earlier documents. The first citation indices were legal citators such as Shepard's Citations...
it 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
Impact factor
The impact factor, often abbreviated IF, is a measure reflecting the average number of citations to articles published in science and social science journals. It is frequently used as a proxy for the relative importance of a journal within its field, with journals with higher impact factors deemed...
, 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
CiteSeer
CiteSeer was a public search engine and digital library for scientific and academic papers. It is often considered to be the first automated citation indexing system and was considered a predecessor of academic search tools such as Google Scholar and Microsoft Academic Search. It was replaced by...
. However, that feature is no longer supported.