Who acknowledges who? A gender analysis

Acknowledgements found in scholarly papers allow for credit attribution among non-authors—from individuals to organizations—that contributed to a piece of research. As such, they are associated with a different kind of recognition than authorship. While several studies have shown that social factors affect authorship and citation practices, few analyses have been performed on acknowledgements. Based on 878,250 acknowledgees mentioned in 291,167 papers published in 2015 retrieved from Web of Science, the objective of this work-in-progress is to better understand such credit attribution practices and how gender may influence them. Our results show that gender disparities generally found in authorship can be extended to acknowledgements, and that women are even more underrepresented in the acknowledgement than in the authors’ list of a paper. Our findings also confirm that women acknowledge proportionally more women. These results suggest that gender plays a role in the entire spectrum of credit attribution practices, from authorships to acknowledgements.