Acknowledgements hit the limelight: Computer analysis recognizes the most thanked people in science.
Who is Olivier Danvy? He is the most thanked person in computer science, according to an automated analysis of almost half-a-million acknowledgements in science papers.
The technique, which relies on text-mining software, offers a new way to investigate the influence of individuals, research agencies and companies within different areas of science. [...]
Lee Giles, a computer scientist at Pennsylvania State University in University Park, Philadelphia, and his colleagues have now developed software that automatically extracts information on who is thanking who from science papers. They used it to analyse 335,000 papers within the lab's CiteSeer archive of computer-science papers to produce rankings of the most thanked funding agencies and individuals in computer science.
