Analyzing the funding and personal acknowledgements of the publications of the University of Kerala during 2001-2018

Abstract

Acknowledgements have caught the attention of policymakers as they, like citations, indicate influential contributions to scientific work. The present paper analyzes the acknowledgements-funding and personal- of the research output of the University of Kerala for the period 2001-2018. Of the 1972 records extracted from the Web of Science, 829 records (42%) had funding information. Among the countries, other than India, the United States was the leading country with 26 funding agencies. There were 166 unique funding agencies of which the Government agencies were the predominant funders. Though Chemistry had the largest number of funded publications, the research area of Geology was seen to be funded by the largest number of 25 funding agencies.  Personal acknowledgements were categorized into five main categories and the category- “Access to Research Related Information” accounted for 46.02% and “Peer Interactive Communication” accounted for 16.82% of the acknowledgements. The lack of consistency of acknowledgement data still poses difficulty in analyzing the acknowledgement section.