How Scholars Credit Editors in Their Acknowledgements

Abstract

Acknowledgements are the one place on public record where scholarly editors receive credit for their contributions to books. Some have argued that the tradition of editorial invisibility is self-defeating; one editor has proposed that editors receive official recognition from the publisher in a book's front matter, irrespective of author acknowledgement. As a preliminary to entertaining such a proposal, this article surveys current practices by authors in a content analysis of acknowledgements sampled from monographs recently published by university presses. The analysis found that editors were often characterized as manuscript shepherds having a dual role: ally to the author and expeditor of production. Speaking for scholarly editors, I oppose making editor recognition a publishing standard, as this might suggest that authors need not credit editors on their own. The cost of such omission would be high, as editors would be left out of the back story to their books.