Publications from DFG-Funded Projects – Practice and Usability of Funding Acknowledgements
Funding acknowledgements are the means by which authors indicate the funding sources of research activities on which a publication is based.
Conducted by the German Centre for Higher Education Research and Science Studies (DZHW) and Forschungszentrum Jülich (FZJ) on behalf of the DFG, the study looks into whether and how well DFG project participants comply with the DFG’s rules on naming the DFG and including the specific project identifier in funding acknowledgements.
The analyses are based on information drawn from over 50,000 publications cited as project results in DFG final reports and the relevant texts of the funding acknowledgements as contained in the publication database “Web of Science”.
One key aspect of the report is the creation of an indicator of “FA quality”. This distinguishes between funding acknowledgements based on the extent to which they comply with the specified rules with regard to naming the DFG and including the project identifier. A distinction is drawn between three quality classes: acknowledgements that comply with the rules, acknowledgements that do not comply with the rules, and failure to acknowledge.
The study also describes a search strategy which can be used to identify publications from DFG-funded projects in bibliometric databases.