57 Acknowledgments sections of academic papers
Scientific papers typically include an Acknowledgments section (NOTE: spelled “Acknowledgements” in British journals). In this section, one thanks colleagues who aided the research and agencies that funded the project. It is often the last section of a paper and is written in haste.
Acknowledgments sections are usually dry. However, when I was a novice graduate student, I discovered that these sections can be informative. I had been reading papers by a well-known field biologist. In his early papers, he acknowledged his wife for support, but in later ones, he acknowledged a different woman. I guessed what might be happening, and later learned I was correct — divorce followed by remarriage. This did not influence my appreciation for his many research contributions, but it did convert “just another scientist” into a real person.
57.1 Personal example no. 1
Early in my writing career, I decided that adding cryptic notes to the Acknowledgments could be entertaining, if only to me. My first solo paper a note in Ecology (Huey 1969) and contains the following sentence:
“Additional encouragement was provided by L. Hershey.”
No one has ever mentioned that sentence to me, which I admit is cryptic. Here’s the context. The Vietnam War was raging at the time, and it was highly unpopular, at least among draft-eligible young men like me. Trying to avoid the draft became a major preoccupation for me and many others. In the early years of the war, one could avoid (or at least postpone) being drafted by staying in school and never taking a break. Taking a “gap year,” which had previously been used by students to explore the world or to work and save money for graduate school, would almost certainly lead to a draft notice. Consequently, many young men stayed in school during the ’60s and ’70s.
Beginning about 1964 (when the War was heating up for US soldiers), the number of men attending college or medical school increased abruptly, and this pulse of male students lasted until the war ended (Singer, 1988; Card and Lemieux, 2011).
The inflated number of graduate students should have induced increase in volume of scientific research and publications. Moreover, I suspect that many of those who stayed in school to avoid the draft (me, for instance) discovered that they liked science and settled into scientific careers.
Card, D., & Lemieux, T. (2001). Going to college to avoid the draft: The unintended legacy of the Vietnam War. Am Econ Rev, 91, 97-102. https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.91.2.97.
Fear of the draft kept me from taking a gap year when I graduated from Berkeley in January 1966. My father was working for an oil company in Tunisia, and his company offered to pay my travel expenses to Tunisia. From there, I could easily get to Europe and spend eight months traveling before starting medical school in the autumn. Faced with the draft, I skipped the trip to Europe and took a job working in the herp lab of the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, UC Berkeley. Amazingly, this earned me an occupational deferment from the draft until I started graduate school in September 1967.
So what does this have to do with my acknowledgment to “L. Hershey”? Well, L. Hershey was General Lewis B. Hershey, Director of the Selective Service System, which ran the draft. I judged that General Hershey deserved an acknowledgment. After all, my fear of the draft had kept me working or studying and thus had inadvertently encouraged my research career. The Selective Service System never noticed my acknowledgment to General Hershey.
57.2 Personal example no. 2
When Eric Pianka invited me to head the fieldwork in the Kalahari, he wanted to spell out authorship on papers that would eventually emerge from our project. Eric knew that authorship credit can be contentious (to put it euphemistically), and so he had the wisdom to set out guidelines on the authorship of future Kalahari papers even before I left for Africa. Eric said that he would be sole author of the first paper, which would describe patterns of species density. This seemed fair – after all, the species density of desert lizards was Eric’s primary research interest, and he wrote the NSF proposal that funded the project. He added that we could co-author other papers as long as I contributed to the analysis and writing.
At the end of our discussion, I did have the presence of mind to say:
“OK, Eric, but I want to write your Acknowledgment to me in your species density paper.”
Eric agreed. Here is what I wrote and what appears in his paper Pianka 1971:
“I am deeply indebted to Raymond B. Huey, who somehow survived for a full year not only extremes of temperature and beer, but also the lack of opportunity to demonstrate his fitness.”
57.3 One last example – not mine!
One of my favorite Acknowledgments was written by the late Leigh van Valen, a brilliant – if eccentric – evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago. Lee grew tired of submitting papers to journals and having them rejected or at least criticized, so he founded his own journal, Evolutionary Theory, which he printed on paper stock with the following tagline:
“Dedicated to the primacy of content over display.”
The first paper in volume 1 (Van Valen 1973) contains the following acknowledgment:
“I thank the National Science Foundation for regularly rejecting my (honest) grant applications for work on real organisms…, thus forcing me into theoretical work.”
57.4 So why bother reading Acknowledgments?
Students and non-scientists often think of science as objective and rather cut and dried. Science is, however, a human endeavor. It is done by people with diverse skills, weaknesses, biases, emotions, and personalities. What someone writes in an Acknowledgments section can provide hints about that scientist’s personality and sometimes adds a human perspective to the scientific paper and project.
When I taught a graduate course on scientific writing, I always discussed acknowledgments sections. But I cautioned the students to be careful what they write in these sections! Some people will be watching.