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I am an undergraduate student and intern publishing a conference paper with a company I have been working with for about a year now and am trying to nail down the acknowledgements. I have never written a paper before. I have a few specific questions:

I am the only student-intern author and also the head author – how do I separate the acknowledgements of the group from my own personal acknowledgements?

Is it acceptable to thank the co-authors for guidance, encouragement, etc.?

Wrzlprmft
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ereastman
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  • Generally, any acknowledgement should be from all the authors. If there's an exemption, then it could be handled by writing "X would like to thank Y." However, by doing so, you are hinting that your co-authors don't want to thank that Y, which might not be desirable. – user2768 Jan 31 '17 at 09:12
  • @user2768 there is nothing wrong or unusual about "X would like to thank Y", and it does not hint or imply anything other than its literal meaning. But as I explained in my answer, it does not make sense for X to thank Y in Y's own coauthored paper. – Dan Romik Jan 31 '17 at 10:04
  • @DanRomik, I did not claim it was "wrong," I did claim it hints. That is actually too strong, I should have written "might hint," which you surely cannot contest. (I did not contest that it does not make sense for "X to thank Y", where Y is a co-author.) – user2768 Jan 31 '17 at 10:37
  • @DanRomik, BMC Medicine write "acknowledge anyone who contributed towards the article who does not meet the criteria for authorship," thus, it seems only natural that acknowledgements are generally from all authors. Indeed, if only one author acknowledges someone who contributed towards the article, then the reader is left wondering why the co-authors aren't acknowledging that contribution. – user2768 Jan 31 '17 at 10:44
  • @user2768 your two comments are quite at odds with each other. If you don't find author-specific acknowledgements wrong or unusual, why would you make statements such as "Generally, acknowledgements should be from all the authors"? I'm sorry but I completely disagree with that statement, and with your implication that there "might" be anything "not desirable" being "hinted". – Dan Romik Jan 31 '17 at 10:51
  • @user2768 what "seems only natural" to you seems far from natural to me. My own papers, and many papers I've read, have many examples of one coauthor acknowledging someone who helped them specifically with no negative connotation or implication of the sort you imagine. Well ok, maybe our disciplines have different conventions about such things and readers in medicine will read something into such an acknowledgement that readers in math do not. Another possibility is that one of us is simply wrong. – Dan Romik Jan 31 '17 at 10:58

2 Answers2

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Is it acceptable to thank the co-authors for guidance, encouragement, etc.?

No, not really. Well, it may be going a bit far to say that doing so would be unacceptable, but I can say two things:

  1. I have never seen an author thanking one of their coauthors.

  2. Thanking your coauthors in your own joint paper with them is illogical. The purpose of the acknowledgements section is to provide a space where the contributions of people other than the paper's authors, which were of too minor a nature to merit authorship, can be acknowledged, so that those people would get some minor (mostly of a psychological, feel-good nature) credit for their help. Your coauthors are already getting a much more major credit than that, so an acknowledgement to them adds nothing.

To summarize, if you want to thank your coauthors, do it in person. I'm sure they would appreciate it.

Dan Romik
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Apparently different people have different opinions about this... and, indeed, usually one joint author does not thank another. But in an extremely unsymmetrical situation such as yours, I'd think it perfectly fine to say something like "the first author thanks the other authors for their mentoring and advice". After all, joint authorship does not necessarily mentoring, for example.

paul garrett
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