Exploring the Correlation Between Acknowledgees’ Contributions and Their Academic Performance

Bibliometric analysis of acknowledgment has been expanding and has aroused the intense interest of academia. However, there is no scientific proof of the relationship between the academic performance of the acknowledgees and the acknowledged paper impact or the frequency of being acknowledged. Further, the disambiguation of the acknowledgees has rarely been discussed. In this study, 1,251,714 full-text papers from PubMed Central were collected, and We collected 82,367 acknowledgees with name and affiliation information from the acknowledgment section of these papers to obtain the possible Scopus author ID (candidate acknowledgee). In addition, 5692 acknowledgees were matched in the Scopus dataset to collect author performance indicators. Further, 1101 acknowledgees required name disambiguation because they had the same author name and affiliation name. Afterward, we identified 399 acknowledgees by considering the entities in the comments and references between the source-paper authors and acknowledgees. Additionally, we evaluated the correlation between the paper citation count and the acknowledgee performance indicators. The result shows that academic performance indicators positively correlate with the source paper citation count. However, there is an extremely weak correlation between academic performance indicators and acknowledgement frequency. Moreover, except for coauthor count, the h-index, citation count, and cited by count all show uptrends as the frequency of being acknowledged increases when depicting the distribution of the above-average values of academic performance indicator.