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Core Resource Acknowledgements

Research core and shared facility managers need reliable measures of impact to report to funders and improve UW-Madison competitiveness for future grants.

This resource includes:

  • best practices to maximize the likelihood that researchers will adequately acknowledge your resource,
  • instructions for finding papers that acknowledge your resource in literature databases, and
  • directions for associating a paper with a core NIH grant in PubMed.

Need more help? Ask a Librarian

Improving Acknowledgement Accuracy and Quality

1 – Create a standard resource/unit name and acknowledgement statement

  • Adopt one standard name for your resource(s) and unit(s) that is as short and unique as possible.
  • Ensure the standard name is consistently used by staff, on website, printed materials, signage, and the Directory of Resources.
  • Develop a short standard acknowledgement statement that includes: your now standard name(s); the grant, funder, or program name(s); and the grant number(s).
  • Sample statements:
    • This [publication/report] was made possible by the UW-Madison Population Information and Analysis Center funded by the U.S. Census Bureau State Project Grant No: LI123123.
    • Research reported in this publication was supported by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute of the National Institute of Health through the UW-Madison Human Health Information Program’s award number A12HL1234567.
    • Part of this work was conducted at the Molecular Analysis Infrastructure facility at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, which is supported by the National Science Foundation (Grant HIJ-123123).

2 – Make the standard statement easily available to researchers online

  • Include in on your website in a format that is easy to cut-and-paste.
  • Ensure the statement is easy to find.

3 – Develop and implement a broader outreach and publicity effort.

  • Incorporate reminder to cite and standard statement into signage and routine communications.
    • Staff email footer
    • Contracts
    • Invoices
    • Newsletters (or other periodic email updates)
    • Equipment/software outputs
    • Footer on all webpages
    • Websites/resource lists of related departments
    • Customized give-aways: pens, mugs, etc.
  • Provide guidance about the circumstances in which researchers need to include your statement.
    • For example: when submitting a relevant grant applications, when submitting a manuscript based on research that used the core or its services, when filing patent applications associated with supported research.
    • Add this guidance to print materials or signage where appropriate.
  • Train staff to routinely share citation information in consultations and other interactions with researchers.
  • Target junior researchers and staff other than PIs in outreach efforts.
  • Follow  up with email reminders to researchers in the period of time you expect them to begin publishing (this can be well after they stop using your resource).

4 – Incorporate statistics or information about cited research into your space or materials.

  • Prominently display or share the number of papers citing your resource over a particular period of time
  • Routinely highlight a recent publication that cites you and associate that with a reminder to cite.
  • Routinely share a list of the publications that you know used your resource.

5 – Follow up with researchers you find have not appropriately cited your resource.

  • When/if you’re able to identify a publication that doesn’t appropriately include your standard statement, contact the relevant authors, researchers, and PI to remind them of the need to include your resource.
  • Ensure they understand that future funding opportunities are improved for all researchers using your resource when you can better articulate its impact.
  • Advise them on the possibility of adding the citation after publication. For example, NIH grants can be associated with articles in PubMed after they’ve been published. (You can do this for PIs that add you as a delegate to their NCBI/PubMed account.)

These best practices include ideas generated during the October 31, 2018 workshop with Core Managers.

Searching the Literature for Acknowledgements

Campus libraries provide access to three databases which can be used to search the funding and acknowledgement sections in scholarly papers.

  • Web of Science
    • Basic Search by Grant Number and Funding Agency (video tutorial)
      • Include variations of grant number formatting: R01GM056414 OR “R01 GM056414” OR R01-GM056414
    • Advanced Search allows for full-text searching of the acknowledgements text; combining this search with an address/affiliation search is a good method for finding acknowledgements of cores without associated grants (video tutorial)
      • Must use field codes to search, FT for Funding Text and AD for Address
      • Example: FT=(“Materials Science Center” OR MSC) AND AD=(Madison OR Wisc*)
  • Scopus
    • Basic Document Search allows for full-text searching of the acknowledgements text and will find both grant numbers and Core names
      • Including variations of grant numbers like with Web of Science; use the Funding Information field to search all acknowledgement text
      • Include Affiliation Search for more accurate results
      • Example search screenshot
  • PubMed
    • Choose the Advanced Search option to search by Grant Number
    • Grant and funding information is usually tucked under the Grant Support heading on the article’s page – click the heading to show the grant numbers. Click the grant number to have PubMed display all papers associated with that award (video tutorial)

Associating NIH Grants to Papers in PubMed

If a published paper did not acknowledge a Core’s NIH grant, the grant can be linked to the paper within PubMed. To do this, one must first have an NCBI (PubMed) account that is linked to the eRA Commons account for the NIH grant.

Once the eRA and NCBI accounts are linked, NIH Grants associated with the eRA account can be linked to papers within PubMed.

Example of an NCBI account that is a Delegate on a PI’s account
  • Log in to your NCBI account
    • Under the Collections heading, click on the ‘My Bibliography’ (if you are the PI of the grant) or the ‘PI’s Bibliography’ (if you are a delegate on their account)
    • Choose a publication from the list and click the Add Award link under it
    • If the paper is not already listed in the Bibliography, you can add it
    • Check off the grant numbers you want to link to this paper – you can add more than one at a time. Click Save & Close to finish.
    • The grant number will now be listed on the paper’s PubMed record under the Grant Support heading