Acknowledgments Section

The part of a scholarly manuscript, typically placed after the discussion/conclusion and before the reference list, where the corresponding author names people and entities that contributed to the work but do not meet the journal's or field's authorship criteria (most commonly ICMJE's four-part test), together with any required disclosure of funding sources and grant/award numbers. A contribution belongs here rather than on the byline when it is real but falls short of authorship on at least one prong — ICMJE's own examples include acquisition of funding, general supervision of a research group or general administrative support, and writing assistance, technical editing, language editing, or proofreading. Because naming someone can be read as implying their endorsement of the paper's data and conclusions, ICMJE recommends that editors require the corresponding author to obtain each acknowledged individual's written permission before publication.

ByCASRAI Editorial Board

· Last updated 30 Jul 2026

Worked examples

Is an instance

A manuscript's acknowledgments section reads: “We thank Dr. J. Alvarez for statistical advice and M. Chen for critical reading of the manuscript. This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health under award number R01GM123456; the funder had no role in study design, data collection, analysis, or the decision to publish.” Neither named person meets all four ICMJE authorship criteria, and the funder is credited by name and grant number as several federal sponsors require.

Is an instance

A large clinical trial's manuscript acknowledges a data safety monitoring board, a group of research coordinators at each enrolling site (named individually with their contribution, e.g., “patient recruitment”), and a medical writer engaged for language editing — with a note that all named individuals gave written permission to be acknowledged, per the journal's ICMJE-aligned policy.

Looks similar, but isn't

Not an instance

Listing a funder that provided no support of any kind for the study, in order to imply a prestigious affiliation, is not a legitimate use of the acknowledgments section — ICMJE's own guidance warns that funding sources and affiliations that did not contribute to the work should not be listed, because doing so is misleading. Similarly, naming a lab head who had no involvement in a specific paper's design, analysis, drafting, or approval — purely because of their seniority — belongs to neither the acknowledgments section nor the byline; contribution has to be real and assessed per work, not conferred by position.

The acknowledgments section is a required or near-universal part of a scholarly manuscript’s back matter, sitting between the discussion/conclusion and the reference list. Its job is narrow but important: name the people, groups, and funding sources that made a real contribution to the work without meeting the journal’s authorship threshold, and disclose the financial support behind the research in a form that funders, indexers, and readers can rely on. It is not a place for informal thanks unconnected to the work, and it is not interchangeable with a byline or a formal CRediT contributor-role statement.

Who belongs in the acknowledgments section

Per ICMJE’s Recommendations, contributors who do not meet all four authorship criteria — substantial contribution to conception/design/data; drafting or critically reviewing the work; final approval of the version to be published; and agreement to be accountable for the work — “should not be listed as authors, but they should be acknowledged.” ICMJE gives concrete examples of contributions that merit acknowledgment rather than authorship on their own: acquisition of funding; general supervision of a research group or general administrative support; and writing assistance, technical editing, language editing, and proofreading. In practice this covers a wide range of real contributors: statisticians and methodology consultants who ran a pre-specified analysis without input into design or interpretation, lab technicians and research coordinators, patient or community partners, medical writers, and colleagues who reviewed a draft without meeting the full authorship bar.

For very large collaborations that credit a working group or consortium as a whole, ICMJE recommends the corresponding author “specify the group name if one exists, and clearly identify the group members who can take credit and responsibility for the work as authors” — distinguishing named authors within a group from other group members who are acknowledged rather than credited as authors.

Written permission is not optional under ICMJE’s guidance

Because being named in the acknowledgments section can read as an implied endorsement of the paper’s data and conclusions, ICMJE recommends that editors require the corresponding author to obtain written permission to be acknowledged from every named individual before publication. This is a genuine compliance step, not a courtesy: an author who names a colleague, funder representative, or institutional figure without asking first is creating a real editorial and, in some cases, ethical problem — particularly if that person would object to being associated with the paper’s conclusions.

How it differs from a CRediT contributor-role statement

The acknowledgments section and a formal CRediT contributor-role statement (ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022) answer related but distinct questions, and a growing number of journals now require both, not one in place of the other:

Acknowledgments is free-text prose naming non-author contributors and disclosing funding; it has no standardized vocabulary and is not machine-readable in any consistent way.
CRediT is a controlled taxonomy of 14 standardized contributor roles (Conceptualization, Data curation, Funding acquisition, Writing – review & editing, and so on), applied to every listed author, and increasingly captured as structured, machine-readable metadata rather than prose.

A person can be named in the acknowledgments section without ever appearing in a CRediT statement (they are not an author at all), and a named author’s CRediT roles are a separate declaration from anything said in the acknowledgments. The two mechanisms are complementary: acknowledgments cover people and entities below the authorship threshold; CRediT documents what named authors actually did. See CASRAI’s guide on writing an author contribution statement and the dictionary entries for acknowledged contributor and non-author contributor for more on this boundary.

Funder and grant-number disclosure is often mandatory, not optional

A point that gets missed: the funding-disclosure content that lands in or near the acknowledgments section is frequently a condition of the award itself, not merely a publishing norm. ICMJE’s manuscript-preparation guidance places “Sources of Support” — grants, equipment, drugs, or other support that facilitated the work or its writing — on the title page, and is explicit that “funding sources and affiliations that have not contributed to the work should not be listed,” since doing so would be misleading. Separately, major funders impose their own binding acknowledgment requirements on grantees:

The U.S. National Science Foundation‘s Proposal & Award Policies & Procedures Guide requires that publications based on or developed under an NSF award carry a specific acknowledgment (“This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. [award number]”) and, for most non-journal publications, a disclaimer that opinions expressed are the authors’ and do not necessarily reflect NSF’s views.
The U.S. National Institutes of Health similarly expects PHS-funded publications to acknowledge NIH support with the specific awarding institute/center and grant number, in a format that supports indexing in PubMed, PubMed Central, and NIH RePORTER.

See CASRAI’s guide to the funding acknowledgement statement for the required wording and disclaimer format funder by funder, including Wellcome, UKRI, and Horizon Europe alongside NSF and NIH.

Because this obligation runs from the funder to the grantee, it applies regardless of whether a given journal’s own house style would otherwise ask for it — a researcher can be in violation of their award terms by omitting or mis-citing a grant number in the acknowledgments section, independent of any journal editorial requirement. Where a journal provides a separate structured “Funding” field at submission (increasingly common, partly to improve indexing), that field satisfies the disclosure obligation; where it doesn’t, the funding statement belongs in the acknowledgments section itself.

Typical contents, in practice

Journal instructions-for-authors vary in exact placement (some split “Funding” or “Sources of Support” into a separate field or section from “Acknowledgments” of people; others combine both under one heading), but the substance a complete acknowledgments section typically covers is:

Named individuals who contributed materially but do not meet authorship criteria, with a brief description of each person’s contribution (e.g., “language editing,” “patient recruitment,” “statistical advice”) and confirmation that each gave permission to be named.
Funding sources with grant, award, or contract numbers, and, where relevant, a statement of the funder’s role (or explicit lack of role) in the study’s design, conduct, analysis, or the decision to publish.
Non-financial support such as equipment loans, access to a facility or dataset, or institutional/administrative support that does not itself qualify as an authorship-level contribution.
Where applicable, a group or consortium acknowledgment listing members who are not individually named as authors.

References

ICMJE, “Defining the Role of Authors and Contributors” (Recommendations, current edition)
ICMJE, “Preparing a Manuscript for Submission to a Medical Journal” (Recommendations, current edition)
ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022, Contributor Roles Taxonomy (CRediT)
U.S. National Science Foundation, Proposal & Award Policies & Procedures Guide (PAPPG)

Use in your systems

JATS XML <role> element

xml

<role vocab="credit"
      vocab-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/"
      vocab-term="Acknowledgments Section"
      vocab-term-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/acknowledgments-section" />

Schema.org DefinedTerm (JSON-LD)

json

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "DefinedTerm",
  "@id": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/acknowledgments-section",
  "name": "Acknowledgments Section",
  "identifier": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/acknowledgments-section",
  "description": "The part of a scholarly manuscript, typically placed after the discussion/conclusion and before the reference list, where the corresponding author names people and entities that contributed to the work but do not meet the journal's or field's authorship criteria (most commonly ICMJE's four-part test), together with any required disclosure of funding sources and grant/award numbers. A contribution belongs here rather than on the byline when it is real but falls short of authorship on at least one prong — ICMJE's own examples include acquisition of funding, general supervision of a research group or general administrative support, and writing assistance, technical editing, language editing, or proofreading. Because naming someone can be read as implying their endorsement of the paper's data and conclusions, ICMJE recommends that editors require the corresponding author to obtain each acknowledged individual's written permission before publication.",
  "inDefinedTermSet": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/domain/credit-extensions#set",
  "url": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/acknowledgments-section",
  "sameAs": [],
  "license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
  "publisher": {
    "@id": "https://casrai.org/#organization"
  },
  "dateModified": "2026-07-30T08:51:37",
  "inLanguage": "en"
}