Acknowledgements on CV

[Student88]

Can I put acknowledgements on my CV? I wouldn't put it under publications but perhaps under an "Acknowledgements" section.  Thanks for opinions. (sorry I meant Acknowledgements on research papers, not enough to be an author but mentioned in the acknowledgements section of an article.) 

Edited December 31, 2013 by Student88

[Guest Gnome Chomsky]

edit: I misread the question. I thought you meant people you'd like to acknowledge as references. My bad. Sorry, I don't have an answer. 

Edited December 31, 2013 by Gnome Chomsky

[Student88]

Sorry about that I have made my question a bit clearer. 

[TakeruK]

This might really depend on the field. In my field, and in most physical sciences, there is no database that records who gets "acknowledged" for what. This basically means that acknowledgements are essentially worthless in the context of a metric of measuring your contribution to the field because 1) there is no easy way to verify it and 2) the fact that is there is no database means it's not important enough to warrant one. Overall, I am seeing more and more things ask for a paper citation instead of an acknowledgement--for example, a supercomputer centre might publish a paper about itself so that people can cite if they use the cluster, which gives them a way to measure their impact/usefulness to the field (and thus help them get funding). In the past, one would only write something like "This worked made use of SuperComputer Cluster XYZ at ABC" in the acknowledgements section.

 

So, my advice for you is to not include this in your CV, at least not in the same way as you would a publication. I think that you should instead mention your contribution to the specific paper(s) under the "Experience" part of your CV where you explain what you did on certain projects. Or, explain it in your SOP when you write about your work on a certain project.

 

Finally, this might really be field dependent (even more so than the above), but in my field, people usually only get "acknowledgements" for activities that aren't really scientifically important to the particular paper. For example, they might have provided a few interesting comments, or proof-read the draft, or maybe they were the referee for the paper. If you made an actual direct science contribution (took some data, made some models, analysed some data, allowed use of your data/models), you would be a co-author. So, I would say that for my field, the actions that gives you an acknowledgement aren't really something you would put in a CV. They are still important and I still think papers should acknowledgement this kind of work, though.

Edited December 31, 2013 by TakeruK

[Student88]

Thank you for this insight! Your answer is the most convincing that is worthless. I feel you are correct. I will not mention it on CV.