Why are acknowledgements important?
Acknowledgements are more than just a feel-good afterthought when submitting your paper: they are of material value to technical staff, shared labs, and future readers of your papers.
Technical staff involved in a wide range of projects can use named acknowledgements to demonstrate their value when seeking promotions or new job opportunities.
Shared Lab Spaces and Core Facilities use acknowledgments (whether of the named facility, PIDs such as RRIDs, or of grant numbers) to justify the resources they use and determine future resource allocation. Granting agencies look at the footprint generated by grants when deciding on future funding for academic labs: therefore, if you find instrumentation access useful and want it to continue, you should acknowledge the facility, and, when relevant, any grant numbers the facility supplies for the work you perform.
Lastly, by acknowledging individuals who contributed to your work, future readers can be made aware of institutional knowledge and resources that are available to them. More people knowing about a facility guarantees its longevity, which is good for everyone!
When should I acknowledge a facility or individual?
A facility should always be acknowledged if staff, data, or instrumentation was used directly or indirectly in research.
A grant or funding number that helped in the purchase or support of an instrument or facility should be included if that resource contributed to the published research.
When should key personnel be acknowledged? Expectations for acknowledgment and/or coauthorship vary, but a list of common contribution scenarios are outlined below:
Contributions to research which may merit an acknowledgement:
- Training of the user to acquire data or images themselves
- Recommendation of software and tools used in data acquisition and analysis
- Basic data analysis help and advice
- Routine sample preparation with standard protocols
- Routine acquisition of raw data
Contributions to research which may merit coauthorship:
- Development of new sample preparation protocols
- Optimization of existing protocols
- Operational image acquisition with input and decisions dependent on expertise
- Design or re-design of experimental conditions
- Constructive data analysis and interpretation
- Significant contributions to the manuscript
How do I know who and what should be acknowledged?
Confirm a list of instruments and key staff involved with all coauthors prior to publication, and contact the facility staff or director to confirm that the given details are correct.
Examples of Acknowledgements:
We include a few examples of acknowledgements below, in no particular order. Check papers in your field for other examples.
Imaging work was performed at the Northwestern University Center for Advanced Molecular Imaging (RRID:SCR_021192) generously supported by NCI CCSG P30 CA060553 awarded to the Robert H Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center.
Imaging data was acquired through the Cornell Institute of Biotechnology’s Imaging Facility (RRID:SCR_021741) with NIH S10OD025049 funding for the SkyScan 1276 mouse CT.
This research used resources of the Advanced Photon Source (APS), a U.S. DOE Office of Science User Facility operated for the DOE Office of Science by Argonne National Laboratory under contract No. DE-AC02-06CH11357.
These data and/or images were produced at the University of Texas High-Resolution X-ray CT Facility (UTCT), which is supported by NSF EAR-2223808 and NASA PSEF 80NSSC23K0199
This work (or insert specific portions of data) was produced with the assistance of personnel (e.g. Jane Doe) using the equipment (e.g., Bruker SkyScan 1173 Micro-CT system) at the Florida Atlantic University Laboratory Schools Marcus Research and Innovation Center (RRID:SCR_023805).
This work was conducted in part at the Nanoscale Research Facility of the Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering at the University of Florida with the valuable assistance of___________.