Much Obliged: Analyzing the Importance and Impact of Acknowledgements in Scholarly Communication

Abstract

According to Robin P. Peek, co-founder of the Open Access Directory and associate professor at the Simmons Graduate School of Library and Information Science, scholarly communication through the dissemination of journals was first reported in 1665 (Peek & Newby, 1996, p. 5). However, it took 337 years for the scholarly community to formalize a global initiative declaring research a public good, with unrestricted, free access for everyone. The 2002 Budapest Open Access Initiative ushered in a paradigm shift in the way scholars create and share knowledge. The launch of the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) in 2003 formalized an alternative venue for scholars to publish their work. From 2004 to 2010, the number of titles listed in the DOAJ rose from 1,250 to more than 5,200(Walters & Linvill, 2010, p. 372). Today, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) continues to work as a catalyst for new models of scholarly communication, working in the fields of author rights, digital repositories, and open data.As the model of scholarly communication evolves and shifts, so too has the field of bibliometrics. The Open Citation Project, a joint NSF-JISC International Digital Libraries Research Programme funded initiative, has been analyzing citation counts in open access repositories, impact factors of open access journals, and the role of preprints in the dissemination of knowledge since 1999. The growing field of altmetrics is currently developing alternative models to traditional citation indices, such as the h-index, and beginning to study the role of Zotero and Mendeley within the context of scholarly communication. These new approaches to scholarly metrics are uncovering the broad intellectual networks contributing to a single journal article, well beyond the bibliography. As a corollary, the persistent myth of the lone scholar working in a silent, secluded office surrounded by books and articles is slowly eroding.Academic libraries have been at the center of many of these endeavors, often pushing open access initiatives on their campuses, building digital repositories, hosting Zotero workshops for faculty and students, and assisting scholars in negotiating author rights for their work. Libraries are pivotal nodes in almost every intellectual network. However, even with the development of new metrics in paratextual evaluation, the work of libraries and librarians continues to be obscured. This is because the libraries lurk in the most overlooked paratextual element: the acknowledgement.What this paper argues is that the acknowledgments are a crucial but overlooked aspect of scholarly communication and bibliometrics. Not only would a comprehensive analysis of acknowledgements provide a more accurate description of intellectual networks, further eroding the myth of the lone scholar, but it would also quantify and illuminate the importance of libraries and librarians in the scholarly communication process. As a corollary, tenure-track librarians should include research acknowledgments in tenure and promotion reports in order to demonstrate their contributions to scholarship.History of Paratextual ScholarshipThere has been a growing interest in the paratextual elements of scholarly communication in the last decade. Formal elements of documentation, footnotes and citations in particular, have become the subject of entire treatises on expressions of intellectual debt.(Grafton, 1997; Hauptman, 2008; Zerby, 2002). Marginalia, written comments or annotations in the margins of manuscripts, in addition, have been examined quite thoroughly by H.J. Jackson's Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books (Jackson, 2001). Scholars in this field have largely focused on the functional attributes of paratextual elements as expressions of intellectual debt. As Sir Anthony Grafton writes about the use of footnotes in historical scholarship, First, they persuade: they convince the reader that the historian has done an acceptable amount of work, enough to lie within the tolerance of the field. …