2022/03/07 by Ozgur Can Seckin, Onur Varol, Seckin, Ozgur Can +1 · 1 citation
Computer Science · Decision Sciences · Health Professions · Psychology · #Computers and Society (cs.CY) #Digital Libraries (cs.DL) #Doctoral Education Challenges and Solutions #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Information Retrieval (cs.IR) #Mental Health Research Topics #Social and Information Networks (cs.SI) #cs.CY #cs.DL #cs.IR #cs.SI #scientometrics and bibliometrics research
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2203.03430
31 pages, 4 figures, 1 table
arxiv created 2022/03/07 · openalex publication_date 2022/03/07 · arxiv updated 2022/03/08 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Current practices of quantifying performance by productivity leads serious concerns for psychological well-being of doctoral students and influence of research environment is often neglected in research evaluations. Acknowledgements in dissertations reflect the student experience and provide an opportunity to thank the people who support them. We conduct textual analysis of acknowledgments to build the "academic support network," uncovering five distinct communities: Academic, Administration, Family, Friends & Colleagues, and Spiritual; each of which is acknowledged differently by genders and disciplines. Female students mention fewer people from each community except for their families and total number of people mentioned in acknowledgements allows disciplines to be categorized as either individual science or team science. We also show that number of people mentioned from academic community is positively correlated with productivity and institutional rankings are found to be correlated with productivity and size of academic support networks but show no effect on students' sentiment on acknowledgements. Our results indicate the importance of academic support networks by explaining how they differ and how they influence productivity.