The Scholar's Courtesy: a Survey of acknowledgement behaviour

Scholars in major us research universities were surveyed to explore the normative bases of acknowledgement behaviour. Measures of agreement and divergence were established in respect of five issue sets pertaining to acknowledgement practice: expectations, etiquette, ethics, equity and evaluation. The results confirm the substantive role played by acknowledgements in the primary communication process. Although few formal rules exist, it is clear that many scholars subscribe to the idea of a governing etiquette. The findings also suggest that acknowledgement data could be mined to lay bare the rules of engagement that define the dynamics of collaboration and inter‐dependence among scholars.

[1]  B. Cronin.  Some reflections on citation habits in psychology , 1980 .

[2]  Michael H. MacRoberts,et al.  Quantitative Measures of Communication in Science: A Study of the Formal Level , 1986 .

[3]  Stephen O. Murray.  The dissolution of “classical ethnoscience” , 1982 .

[4]  C. Bazerman.  Modern Evolution of the Experimental Report in Physics: Spectroscopic Articles in Physical Review, 1893-1980 , 1984 .

[5]  Blaise Cronin,et al.  Let the credits Roll: a Preliminary Examination of the Role played by Mentors and Trusted Assessors in disciplinary Formation , 1991, J. Documentation.

[6]  Don Spiegel,et al.  Assignment of publication credits: Ethics and practices of psychologists. , 1970 .

[7]  E. Ben‐Ari.  On Acknowledgements in Ethnographies , 1987, Journal of Anthropological Research.

[8]  Herbert S. White,et al.  Rankings of Library and Information Science Faculty and Programs: The Third in a Series of Studies Undertaken at Six-Year Intervals , 1993, The Library Quarterly.

[9]  M. Moore,et al.  Sex and acknowledgments: A nonreactive study , 1984 .

[10]  D. Edge.  Quantitative Measures of Communication in Science: A Critical Review , 1979, History of science; an annual review of literature, research and teaching.

[11]  Stephen Turner,et al.  The origins of ‘mainstream sociology’ and other issues in the history of American sociology , 1994 .

[12]  John Law,et al.  Putting Facts Together: A Study of Scientific Persuasion , 1982 .

[13]  Blaise Cronin,et al.  The Norms of acknowledgement in Four Humanities and Social Sciences disciplines , 1993, J. Documentation.

[14]  K. McCain.  Communication, Competition, and Secrecy: The Production and Dissemination of Research-Related Information in Genetics , 1991 .

[15]  Daryl E. Chubin,et al.  Trusted Assessorship in Science: A Relation in Need of Data , 1975 .

[16]  Blaise Cronin,et al.  Accounting for influence: acknowledgments in contemporary sociology , 1993 .

[17]  J P Kassirer,et al.  On authorship and acknowledgments. , 1991, The New England journal of medicine.

[18]  Charles H. Davis,et al.  Acknowledgments and Intellectual Indebtedness: A Bibliometric Conjecture , 1993, J. Am. Soc. Inf. Sci..

[19]  R. Winston.  A Suggested Procedure for Determining Order of Authorship In Research Publications , 1985 .

[20]  Norman M Kaplan,et al.  The norms of citation behavior: Prolegomena to the footnote , 1965 .

[21]  Blaise Cronin,et al.  Patterns of acknowledgement , 1992, J. Documentation.

[22]  Blaise Cronin,et al.  The Need for a Theory of citing , 1981, J. Documentation.

[23]  J. Boyce,et al.  Reimbursement for nosocomial infections. , 1988, Annals of internal medicine.