Current Science

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Apart from citation counting, the study of recorded acknowledgements by researchers as a recognizable metric to evaluate peer influence is currently gaining momentum. As a metric, acknowledgements have an advantage over citations. Whereas citations can be copied and pasted from one publication to the next by an unscrupulous researcher without being studied in depth, acknowledgements cannot be lifted in such a duplicitous style. Here I present an exploratory survey of acknowledgement patterns in journal papers by Francis Crick. Five principal categories (namely, moral, financial, editorial, instrumental/technical and conceptual) were studied from 104 papers authored by Crick, either solely or collaboratively, over a span of five decades. To the best of my knowledge, there are no earlier studies where acknowledgement patterns of a well-recognized interdisciplinary scientist are reported cumulatively.
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