Why Aren't Acknowledgements Acknowledged in Academic Citation Indeces and Metrics?

Note: a crucial amendment to the original post has been made in the last paragraph. The tip from Daniela Cutas making this possible is hereby acknowledged!

Today, as many times before I received a so-called "alarm" from Google Scholar in my email inbox. This notified me of a new research publication in the GS index related to myself, but this time it was none of my own work that had appeared online and neither one in which some of my work was cited, which are otherwise the typical contents of these "alarms". It was, instead, a new article by Neil Levy in Biology & Philosophy, called "Addiction as a disorder of belief", where I'm mentioned in the acknowledgements section, due to Neil having presented a draft of this paper at our research seminar last term and, apparently, some comment of mine had been of help.

This made me think of how important an institution acknowledgements are in the academic world, especially in those parts where extensive multi-authorship is not the norm, as in philosophy, ethics and, in fact, most of the humanities and social sciences. It is in the acknowledgements that you recognize contributions of others to your work other than having actually written it together and these can be everything from subtle to such broad or basic contributions that they cannot be captured by any specific article or book citation. Often this happens with people you interact with in the course of doing your research as they are also in a work in progress stage, which in the mentioned field is often equivalent to working on the manuscript. Or it is the contributions of people who have not published anything on the topic, but nevertheless provide useful suggestions. Thus, mentioning in acknowledgements is quite a non-trivial thing; it is, in fact, an integral part of exhibiting the collective nature of research also in these parts of academia. No wonder, then, that philosophers (and I'm sure others, but philosophers are whom I know best) pay a rather great deal of attention to who is being mentioned in acknowledgements and how, as this reveals a great deal about what interactions lie behind a piece of work and also the nature of the research environment of the author. In books, the foreword/preface (where acknowledgements usually surface) is thus a central section for geting a grip on what is many times a highly complex body of information, argument and advancement of intellectual thought (regardless if you end up agreeing or not). In the natural and technological sciences, as well as biomedicine, achnowledgement do not, as far as I have come to understand through my rather abundant interactions with people from such fields over the years, occupy this type of important position. Rather, they are an aside reserved for funding agencies, and people who do not (or have not been deemed to) deserve to be included as co-authors, part of the consortium, or whatever immense collective body is the author in the particular case. Basically, if one researcher has interacted with some other researcher in the production of a piece of research, this will show in the form of co-authorship, not acknowledgement. In the humanities and social sciences, the rule is rather the opposite, which makes acknowledgements immensely valuable, as (due to a much smaller degree of fragmentation of publication) it often may take quite a while for a working in progress to end up in the form of an actually published work – in the case of books (still the finest of merit in these fields), not seldom several years. True, some mentions in acknowledgements reflect very minor contributions, sometimes just material ones, like having invited someone to present at a seminar or provided a visiting fellowship for a brief while, but that goes for co-authorship in those other academic fields as well - where a place in the list of author has, as we all know, become a currency to trade for all sort of things material related to conducting research. You want a peak at my data?/collaborate with my post doc/profit from my comments/use my tool, I get authorship – that sort of thing.

That could have been the end of it, if it wasn't for the increasing importance for funding and career of how you score on various citation metrics. This tool for measuring how influential your work comes from the natural, technological and biomedical sciences and thus concentrate on authorship and citation of published articles. Due to its increased use also for ranking humanities and social science academics, it is now increasingly including also books on academic publishers and conference proceedings (which in some fields are just as long and peer reviewed as journal articles). However, it is still citation of a published work that counts, which means that mention in acknowledgement will not improve your citation ranking. This means, that a substantial part of how influence on each other's work and collective interaction in research is conveyed for humanities and social science researchers, is simply ignored by these systems – now used for allocating our money and assessing our merit. Simply put: the tool is currently significantly biased and rigged to the disbenefit of humanities and social science researchers for no good reason.

At the same time, it seems to me, that with today's technology in publication and research accomplishment indexing, it should actually be no problem at all to have mention in acknowledgement be reflected in citation indeces and metrics. [Added in retrospect] And indeed it isn't, as was demonstrated already in 2004, in this articel. This goes for all of the larger indexes, including Google Scholar Citations, Thompson Reuter's Web of Knowledge and Ellsevier's Scopus. Alternatively, universities, governments and funding bodies paying attention to existing metrics, should add in their assessment of humanities and social sciences a further citation dimension of this type. Otherwise, the resulting allocation and assessments will be substantially misguided and missing a crucial part of what drives research and innovation outside of the already highly privileged fields of natural, technological and biomedical science.

A Mighty Rumble in Swedish Academia as Top Management Fight at Uppsala University Resolves

Today, the board of Uppsala University, one of Sweden's top four broad universities and its oldest – instigated in 1477 – declared full confidence for its Vice Chancelor, Eva Åkesson, after an open declaration of no confidence from 11 chaired professors, deans and vice rectors (3). This has been the "talk of the town" around Swedish academia the last few weeks.

Already, one of the three vice rector is reported to have resigned, and the Uppsala daily, Uppsala Nya Tidning, reports that all of them have handed in resignations and expressed "shock" at the decision, but at least one of the deans who signed the no confidence letter is reported to comment that he wants to continue. It remains to be seen how the rest of the signing parties will react.

The content of the conflict and crisis of confidence remains somewhat mysterious, but today's press conference delivered hints at both procedural and personal difficulties. Earlier information has referred to more substantial disagreements regarding budgetary and organisational issues as being part of the conflict as well.

UK Plan to Sell Out NHS Medical Records Hits Another Bump: Data Prematurely Given to Insurance Industry – MP's Concerned

So, when I posted just the other day on the embarrassing setbacks and "tactical withdrawal" of the, to my eyes indefensible (my arguments have been presented here, here and here), plan of the UK national health service to start a system (called care.data) for giving access to partly identifiable patient data (in view of recent demonstrations, I would say wholly identifiable if there's some genetic data in there) not only for public research institutions, but also private companies, some with obvious vested interests to use said sort of data against individual people, I frankly thought that this would be the last we heard about this scheme for some while. Surely, I believed, the NHS Health and Social Care Information Centre, which handles this whole shebang, would now be very, very sure to do everything right and not attract any attention. I was wrong.

Today, the BBC reports about a hearing by the parliamentary, cross-party Health Select Committee, where NHS bosses were confronted with allegations voiced this Monday that, in fact, confidential patient data had been handed over to private insurance industry a good while earlier, and the intention of said industry was – surprise! – actions which go against the interests of patients:

But on Monday it emerged the Information Centre - or NHS Information Centre as it used to be known - gave that hospital data, which was largely anonymous, to the insurance industry in 2012.
A report was then produced advising insurance and investment firms how it could use the information to price their products.
The Information Centre has now said this should probably not have happened as it should have applied "greater scrutiny" to the application.

"Should probably not have happened", is that the understatement of the month on the royal island, by any chance? MP's in the committee are reported to have rightfully swung Centre boss Max Jones by his ears when he was unable to provide an account of why the data had been shared in this way. MP Rose Cooper is reported to have commented afterwards: "It is amazing how many questions we've not got answers [to]." No wonder Sarah Wollaston, tory MP and herself a GP is reported to have said (with admirable restraint, to my mind): "I'm very disappointed...this threatens public confidence."

Indeed it does. Besides the interests of ordinary people who now and then needs to visit the doctor, that is. Besides the interests of people who feel a need to purchase private health insurance to have an adequate protection. Besides people who now and then needs to purchase pharmacological products for treatment (who may just as well be the targets of pricing schemes from big pharma, like the one here reported from insurance industry).

You think I'm exaggarating? Read this report in yesterday's Guardian about a just unmasked big pharma industry lobby campaign towards the Centre to have them grant quick and "easy access" to care.data material. A memorandum of mutual understanding has been sought, it transpires. Presumably in the same good spirit of cooperation that explains the reported handing over of data to private insurance companies. I for one is only that close to do a "what did I tell you" with regard to the supposedly strict vetting for access to care.data.

The attempt of the Center's management to push the toothpaste back into the tube by promising to "look into it" and announcing that the Centre is "considering" a beefed up anonymisation procedure, does not inspire confidence. Not when we know that such anonymisation is nowadays easily circumvented in many cases, and against the background of the obvious flaw of the whole basic idea from the very start. Using patient data for research by public research institutions (after due scrutiny, permission and consent), fine. There are, as Ben Goldacre argued just a few days ago, some pretty good reasons to make use of national health service and other health registry data to such an effect, reasons in terms of benefiting lots of people without putting anyone in harms way. The present idea of granting private business interests privileged access (indeed, access at all) is, however, not justified by such reasons.

On the very contrary. And hopefully, UK national policy makers, MPs and others, are now finally starting to see the flaws of this idea of inviting greed, corruption and sloppiness where the need is for ethics, care and seriousness.