(The poet Willie Perdomo, by the way, is the John Coltrane of acknowledgments. “Acknowledgement” as mycelial love note.)

Rennie, Yank, andEmanuel (1997) that the distinction between the two modesof credit allocation is inherently artificial. Consequently,they have argued for explicit description of all individualcontributions as a means of eliminating ambiguity. Such aproposal would remove both authorship and acknowledg-ment from the frame, a really quite significant break withscholarly publishing tradition. This alternative amounts to aradical model of authorship attribution in contrast to thestandard model

Kassirer and Angell (1991, p. 1511)of theNew England Journal of Medicinewere bemoaningnot only “ambiguous authorship” but “lengthy acknowledg-ments,” inflated by the inclusion of “everybody who hadanything to do with the study, including those who weremerely carrying out their jobs, such as technicians.”

Bazerman (1984, 1988) has chronicled the evolutionof the acknowledgment during the 19th and 20th centuriesin the journal literature of experimental physics, showinghow it became, to paraphrase Grafton (1997, p. 233), anintegral part of the rhetoric of narration and annotation

“sub-authorship collaboration” (Patel, 1973, p. 81),

twe should not assume too much in terms of common un-derstandings: the dividing line between the two classifica-tions, author and acknowledgee, is neither universally ap-preciated nor consistently applied. Cronin (1995, pp. 85–86), for instance, has shown that interpretative disputes arenot uncommon, and that some researchers feel that theyhave been denied their just deserts by being downgradedfrom coauthor to acknowledgee. A

The explosion of coauthorship naturally raises the ques-tion why authorial surplus could not be accommodated inthe acknowledgment sections that accompany the great ma-jority of scientific articles.

ut before considering theICMJE’s guidelines for authorship, it may be instructive toreflect on the role of acknowledgments in the primarycommunication process, and the relationship between au-thorship and acknowledgment.

ncidentally, parallel,though not quite so dramatic, growth has been observed inthe number of individuals being formally acknowledged inscholarly journals for their multifarious contributions: whathas become known as subauthorship collaboration (Patel,1973; Heffner, 1979, 1981; Cronin, 1995, Cronin,2001)—an important, if underappreciated, indicator of in-formal scientific collaboration