Representation of Libraries in Funding Acknowledgments

Abstract

Acknowledgments are an important aspect of the scholarly communication process. The importance of these paratextual components were pioneered by Cronin in the 1990s and is now an established field of study (e.g., Cronin, 1995). While an acknowledgment is a small part of a publication, it highlights the contributions of others to the research and scholarship. More recently, linguistic analysis has found recognition beyond funding in Web of Science (WoS) full-text funding acknowledgments (FAs) (Paul-Hus et al., 2017). Some researchers have begun to use library acknowledgments (LAs) in publications as a way to examine the impact of academic libraries (Finnell 2014; Hubbard et al., 2018; Scrivener, 2009). This study fills a gap by quantifying and characterizing the representation of libraries in WoS FAs. More specifically, (1) Are libraries acknowledged in journal article FAs and to what extent and context? (2) How do LAs differ across disciplines and time? and (3) How do FAs mentioning libraries differ among peer universities?