The DOI matches its Crossref record; 54 of the 56 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Acknowledgements are not just thank you notes: A qualitative analysis of acknowledgements content in scientific articles and reviews published in 2015
Open accessAbstract
Acknowledgements in scientific articles can be described as miscellaneous, their content ranging from pre-formulated financial disclosure statements to personal testimonies of gratitude. To improve understanding of the context and various uses of expressions found in acknowledgements, this study analyses their content qualitatively. The most frequent noun phrases from a Web of Science acknowledgements corpus were analysed to generate 13 categories. When 3,754 acknowledgement sentences were manually coded into the categories, three distinct axes emerged: the contributions, the disclaimers, and the authorial voice. Acknowledgements constitute a space where authors can detail the division of labour within collaborators of a research project. Results also show the importance of disclaimers as part of the current scholarly communication apparatus, an aspect which was not highlighted by previous analyses and typologies of acknowledgements. Alongside formal disclaimers and acknowledgements of various contributions, there seems to remain a need for a more personal space where the authors can speak for themselves, in their own name, on matters they judge worth mentioning.
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“However, since AI is not human, lacks agency, and is unaccountable, there is hesitation to mention GAI in an acknowledgments section alongside collaborators.34”
From Publishers’ and journals’ instructions to authors on use of generative artificial intelligence in academic and scientific publishing: Bibliometric analysis (2024) · cites this paper as [34]
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Citations
Cites
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Ganjavi, C., Eppler, M. B., Pekcan, A., Biedermann, B., Abreu, A., Collins, G. S., Gill, I. S., & Cacciamani, G. E. (2024) · BMJ · doi:10.1136/bmj-2023-077192 · Cited by 266
A brief guide to the science and art of writing manuscripts in biomedicine
Forero, D. A., López‐León, S., & Perry, G. L. (2020) · Journal of Translational Medicine · doi:10.1186/s12967-020-02596-2 · Cited by 54
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Metadata
- Authors
- Paul-Hus, A., & Desrochers, N.
- Affiliations
- Université de Montréal (CA)
- Corresponding author
- Desrochers, Nadine
- ORCID
- Paul-Hus, Adèle
- Venue
- PLOS ONE
- Publisher
- Public Library of Science (PLoS)
- Published
- 2019-12-19
- Volume
- 14
- Issue
- 12
- Pages
- e0226727
- ISSN
- 1932-6203 (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC6922370
- OpenAlex
- W2996436809
- Cited by
- 46
- References
- 56
- Citations by year
- 2026: 8 · 2025: 6 · 2024: 11 · 2023: 8 · 2022: 5 · 2021: 5 · 2020: 2
- Type
- paratext
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- PLoS ONE (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- Europe PMC (PubMed Central) (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (submittedVersion)
- DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
- Funders
- Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (Joseph-Armand Bombardier CGS Doctoral Scholarships, 430-2014-0617)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Linguistics and Language › Discourse Analysis in Language Studies
- Social Sciences › Library and Information Sciences › Academic Writing and Publishing
- Social Sciences › Library and Information Sciences › scientometrics and bibliometrics research
- Keywords
- acknowledgment, scientific articles, disclaimers, authorial voice, scientific contributions, financial disclosure, scholarly communication, authorship, research collaboration
- MeSH terms
- Authorship, Cooperative Behavior, Ethics, Professional, Humans, Peer Review, Periodicals as Topic, Conflict of Interest, Disclosure, Information Dissemination, Biomedical Research
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- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Acknowledgements are not just thank you notes: A qualitative analysis of acknowledgements content in scientific articles and reviews published in 2015. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1371/journal.pone.0226727
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- Paul-Hus, A., & Desrochers, N. (2019). Acknowledgements are not just thank you notes: A qualitative analysis of acknowledgements content in scientific articles and reviews published in 2015. PLOS ONE. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0226727
