In the creative arts and scientific literature, an acknowledgment (British English also acknowledgement) is an expression of a gratitude for assistance in creating an original work.
Receiving credit by way of acknowledgment rather than authorship indicates that the person or organization did not have a direct hand in producing the work in question, but may have contributed funding, criticism, or encouragement to the author(s). Various schemes exist for classifying acknowledgments give the following six categories:
- moral support
- financial support
- editorial support
- presentational support
- instrumental/technical support
- conceptual support, or peer interactive communication (PIC)
Apart from citation, which is not usually considered to be an acknowledgment, acknowledgment of conceptual support is widely considered to be the most important for identifying intellectual debt. Some acknowledgments of financial support, on the other hand, may simply be legal formalities imposed by the granting institution. Occasionally, bits of science humor can also be found in acknowledgments.
There have been some attempts to extract bibliometric indices from the acknowledgments section (also called “acknowledgments paratext”)of research papers to evaluate the impact of the acknowledged individuals, sponsors and funding agencies.
Non-fiction
In non-fiction writing, especially academic works, it is generally considered important to give credit to sources of information and ideas. Failure to do so often gives rise to charges of plagiarism, and “piracy” of intellectual rights such as the right to receive a royalty for having written. In this sense the financial and individual meanings are linked.
Academic papers generally contain a lengthy section of footnotes or citations. Such detailed crediting of sources provides readers with an opportunity to discover more about the cited material. It also provides a check against misquotation, as it’s easy for an attributed quote to be checked when the reference is available. All of this is thought to improve integrity of the instructional capital conveyed, which may be quite fragile, and easy to misinterpret or to misapply.
In fiction
In fiction writing, authors are generally expected to give credit to those who contributed significantly to a work. Sometimes authors who do not want credit for their work directly may choose to use a pen name. A ghostwriter gives all or some of the credit for his or her writing to someone else.