Acknowledgements found in scholarly papers allow for credit attribution of nonauthor contributors. As such, they are associated with a different kind of recognition than authorship. While several studies have shown that social factors affect authorship and citation practices, few analyses have been performed on acknowledgements. Based on 878,250 acknowledgees mentioned in 291,167 papers published between 2015 and 2017, this study analyzes the gender and academic status of individuals named in the acknowledgements of scientific papers. Our results show that gender disparities generally found in authorship can be extended to acknowledgements, and that women are even more underrepresented in acknowledgements section than in authors’ lists. Our findings also show that women acknowledge proportionally more women than men do. Regarding academic status, our results show that acknowledgees who have already published tend to have a higher position in the academic hierarchy compared with all Web of Science (WoS) authors. Taken together, these findings suggest that acknowledgement practices might be associated with academic status and gender.

The publication of special issues constitute an important yet underinvestigated phenomenon of scholarly communication. In an attempt to draw attention to the proliferation of special issues, Priem (2006) suggested that their commissioning has an underestimated opportunity cost, given the relative scarcity of publication space: by distorting the “marketplace for ideas” through the commanding of preselected topical distributions, special issues undermine the total research output by “squeezing out” high-quality but topically unrelated articles. The present paper attempts to test this hypothesis by providing a topicality and research impact analysis of conference-based, monographic, and regular issues published between 2010 and 2015 inclusive and indexed in Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science. The results show that the titles and abstracts of articles copublished are topically closer to each other than those copublished in regular issues, which suggests that their relative importance might influence the total topical distribution. However, disciplinary and overall comparison of relative citations for both special and regular issues shows that intraissue averages and variances in the former case are respectively higher and lower than in the regular issue context, which undermines not only the abovementioned hypothesis, but also the belief that editors often “fill up” special issues by accepting substandard papers.