Thanksgiving.

No, we’re not talking turkeys but acknowledgements. Lee Giles and friends have been mining (mostly) computer science papers to determine what people and what funding agencies get thanked the most. In an article with Isaac Councill, “Who Gets Acknowledged: Measuring Scientific Contributions through Automatic Acknowledgment Indexing” in the current issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences he described how they automatically extracted the metadata from documents on the web and the various formulae they used for thank ranking.

The most thanked individual? Oliver Danvy of the University of Aarhus. The most thanked organization? NSF or DARPA, depending on the formula used. Eventually the information will appear on CiteSeer, but for now see these news items:

• Nature news: New Method Ranks Impact of Computer and Information Science Funding Agencies, Institutions and Individuals
• Penn State press release: Acknowledgements hit the limelight

Acknowledgement metadata on papers may become another interesting source of social network information.

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