Acknowledgments in Neurology research articles: A contrastive study (English – Spanish)

Abstract

This article reports the findings of a content analysis of acknowledgments, authorship and collaboration practices in a medical corpus made up of 100 English- and 100 Spanish-written research papers, distributed in five blocks of 20 papers each, and randomly drawn in the period 2001–2012 from BMC Neurology and Revista Española de Neurología, two of the leading Neurology journals in their respective languages. In order to discover the similarities and differences between both samples, the objective of this contrastive research was three-fold: 1) to analyse the frequency, length and types of acknowledgments; 2) to examine the number of authors, sub-authors and unnamed individuals mentioned in the subtitles, acknowledgment sections, annexes and appendices of the research papers included in the whole sample; and 3) to explore the different types of collaboration among all the participants involved in the research. Although the types of acknowledgments are similar in both contexts, the English-medium sample presents more research papers with acknowledgments, more acknowledgments and longer acknowledgments. In both corpora public funding is the component which receives most acknowledgements, although again much more in English than in Spanish. Of the many people involved in the investigation, Spanish-speaking authors are more numerous than English-speaking authors, whereas English sub-authors and unnamed individuals outnumber their Spanish counterparts. As for the different types of collaboration, in the two samples ‘local’ collaboration clearly predominates above the remaining variants. Possible explanations for the differences and similarities observed, among them a possible correlation between the higher presence of acknowledgments and the research published in English, are provided. The results presented here give some hints about the collaboration and communication practices followed by two different language scientific communities.