Petrovich – Acknowledgments Co-Mention Networks – DS² 2021
Channel: CEFISES at UCLouvain
Date: 2021-03-17

The talk “Acknowledgments Co-Mention Networks: A new method for mapping the social structure of scholarly fields”, by Eugenio Petrovich (Università degli Studi di Siena), recorded at the DS² 2021 online conference, March 16, 2021.



Researchers in bibliometrics and scientometrics have developed in the last decades powerful techniques for mapping the intellectual structure of research fields. Methods based on citation analysis (direct citation links, co-citation analysis and bibliographic coupling) and textual analysis (co-word analysis) allow us to produce detailed science maps to visualize and investigate the structure and development of research fronts, knowledge badges, and communication flows between research areas (Petrovich, 2020). As to the social structure of science, i.e., the network of interacting researchers underlying the development of scientific ideas, however, science mapping offers comparatively a less rich toolbox. Co-authorship networks, which focus on the formal collaboration ties between researchers, have become the standard in this sense (e.g., Newman, 2001).


However, co-authorship analysis suffers from well-known limitations related to the practices of authorship. One the one hand, the contributions of the co-authors may vary considerably, including the limit case of “gift authorships”, where the authorship is not matched by any real contribution to the work. On the other hand, not all forms of scientific collaboration result in co-authorship (Laudel, 2002). Especially in the humanities and the social sciences, where authorship seems to be strictly dependent on the material writing of the publication (Hellqvist, 2009), informal collaboration may be particularly difficult to track by co-authorship.


In the light of these shortcomings, scholars such as Blaise Cronin have proposed to examine the acknowledgments of scientific publications to gain a richer picture of collaboration practices and to capture informal collaboration ties in particular (Cronin, 1995). Acknowledgments analysis seems especially valuable for fields in the social sciences and the humanities, where co-authorship is scarcely diffused and, hence, co-authorship networks are too sparse for being truly informative (Díaz-Faes & Bordons, 2017).


In this study, we draw on the bibliometric literature on acknowledgments analysis to propose a new method to map the social structure of science. This method relies on the analysis of co-mention of researchers in publications’ acknowledgments. Specifically, the acknowledgmee co-mention network is constructed using the scholars mentioned in the acknowledgments (the so-called “acknowledgees”) as nodes and connecting them when they are mentioned together in the same acknowledgments. The strength of the link is then set proportional to the number of acknowledgments in which scholars are mentioned together. Lastly, clustering algorithm are applied to the network to reveal communities of frequently co-mentioned acknowledgees, obtaining a map of the informal groups of collaborating researchers, akin to invisible colleges (Crane, 1972), that constitute the social texture of research fields.


To assess the viability and interest of this method, we tested it on a humanities field, i.e., analytic philosophy, that was recently already investigated with citation analysis techniques (Petrovich & Buonomo, 2018). We manually collected the acknowledgment sections of 2073 articles published in five prestigious analytic philosophy journals in the timespan 2005-2019. Then, we extracted the names of the acknowledgees with an algorithm for named entity recognition and manually consolidated the data by merging names’ variants and correcting errors. Lastly, we constructed the acknowledgee co-mention network and studied both its structural properties and dynamics over time.


Results show that the community of acknowledgees is four times bigger than the community of formal authors, that few acknowledgees are highly mentioned whereas most of them receive only one mention, and that the clusters of co-mention acknowledgees partially reflect the intellectual structure of the field. Interestingly, the acknowledgee co-mention network is denser and less divided in clusters than the co-citation network extracted from the same set of publications, showing that the social structure of analytic philosophy is somehow more inter-connected than its intellectual structure, i.e., that the differentiation in research sub-disciplines is more pronounced at the intellectual than at the social level.



These results show that acknowledgments mapping can be a promising new tool for researchers interested in digital methods for the social analysis of scholarly communities.