Today I read the article Audio Nonlinear Modeling through Hyperbolic Tangent Functionals (Adalberto Schuck Jr., Bardo Ernst Josef Bodmann) and noticed a footnote attached to each author stating, "This work was supported by author own support". I've never seen this in a paper before and am curious what it means. Does it imply the paper wasn't supported by the associated university, i.e. produced in the authors' spare time without university resources?
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1Is it, perhaps, something special to Brazil? You could ask them directly, of course.– BuffyCommented Jan 13 at 22:40
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3 Answers
The sentence is not written in a way someone whose principal language is English would have written it, and so there is a level of ambiguity in this statement that you can probably only resolve by asking the authors directly.
But your suggestion that the work was done in the authors' spare time and without university resources is certainly a reasonable reading. It is what I would have assumed as well.
answered Jan 13 at 23:00
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Thanks, and good point! Sometimes I forget that I can just reach out to authors directly.– cvpinesCommented Jan 13 at 23:26
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13It feels like someone filling in a form. "This work was supported by:" as a prompt, and the answer "author own support" where it would normally be "funding body under grant xxx"– Chris HCommented Jan 14 at 14:42
My guess is that the journal required authors to list their funding source or choose “own support” if they had no funding. So it might mean either that they did the work in their personal time with no support from their employer or that they did it as part of their employment, but without any specific funding.
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The footnote in question does not seem like something a journal would require. Commented Jan 14 at 4:30
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4Journals often require authors to disclose their funding. If not well implemented, it might result in a footnote like this if the authors did not have specific funding to disclose. One could check other recent papers in the journal and see whether all authors have funding listed — or else similar footnotes — for those papers Commented Jan 14 at 4:51
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2I'm familiar with this particular journal, and it does not require disclosure of funding.– cvpinesCommented Jan 14 at 15:23
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2It could also be that the author has the habit of writing that, because they also write in other journals that require it (or a variant of this). Commented Jan 15 at 17:59
Targeted funding
As a minimum this means that they didn't have a grant or other funding specifically allocated for this research project.
University research activity
Another possibility is that the University in question may not have designated research activity, i.e., the professors are enumerated solely for teaching and not for carrying out research and publishing papers (aka "four year college" in the US). However, this does not seem to be the case for the University in question.
Publishing and conference fees
Top research journals often charge publication fees (in the range of a few hundred dollars/euro), which are typically paid by the employer (University or Company) or grant funding, but in principle can be paid by the authors themselves (outside of the first-tier Universities, especially beyond the US or Europe, getting from the institution a few hundred dollars/euro for publishing a paper may be difficult.)
Same applies to conference participation, which seems more likely in this case, since the paper in question is published in conference proceedings - possibly the authors attended the conference at their own expense (conference fees, transportation, hotel, etc.)
