Abstract

This study examines acknowledgment practices in Korean social science journals by extending an acknowledgment classification framework originally developed in library and information science. Focusing on whether existing typologies adequately capture social science practices and how acknowledgment patterns differ across disciplines, this study analyzes 922 articles published between 2017 and 2021 in KCI-listed journals in psychology, journalism and communication, and sociology. Acknowledgment statements were manually collected from full-text articles and analyzed using qualitative content analysis with an open coding approach. Based on this process, the original classification scheme was revised and expanded to reflect disciplinary characteristics of the social sciences. The results indicate that 74.7% of social science articles included acknowledgments, a higher proportion than that observed in library and information science during the same period. The findings also show that the existing classification framework was insufficient to capture key features of social science acknowledgment practices, leading to the development of an expanded scheme with five major categories and twenty-five subcategories. In particular, peer interactive communication emerged as a prominent acknowledgment type, especially in sociology, despite being rarely observed in library and information science journals. These results highlight substantial disciplinary variation in acknowledgment practices and provide empirical evidence for developing field-sensitive acknowledgment classification and data construction in the Korean academic context.