Funding acknowledgements are important when it comes to assessing and evaluating funding lines and further developing the funding portfolio. They indicate the funding that has been instrumental in enabling the research work and such evidence may be relevant when reviewing renewal proposals of research projects or major instrumentation grant applications. And there is a mandated way to do so. These are not our words. It is an extract from the recently launched webpage on funding acknowledgements from the DFG.
Moreover the DFG initiated an analysis of more than 50.000 publications that where mentioned in the project reports send to the DFG. The study conducted by the German Centre for Higher Education Research and Science Studies (DZHW) and Forschungszentrum Jülich (FZJ) shows, that although the DFG is correctly mentioned in 90 percent of publications resulting from DFG projects, in a good 40 percent of cases the syntax of the acknowledgements is incorrect. A conciderable amount of people still use the "Geschäftszeichen" or custom reference numbers to add them as identifier to the acknowledgements. They seem not to be aware of the nine digit project number, that serves as a unique identifier in publications since 2016.
Speaking for the core facilites. If DFG funded resources (our core staff) or major instrumentation has contributed significantly to your publication, a funding acknowlegdement is mandatory. You can now go the common way and try to look up the project numbers of major instrument grant applications in the GEPRIS data base. Or you can simply derive the project numbers of the instrumentation used from our web pages. You only have to know the name of the instrument you worked on. And there should be some DFG stickers on the machines.
In summary and as we said already: Your acknowledgment matters and it is more than a nice way to say "Thank you"
Looking forward to support you on your way to your next or first publication.
Sincerely
your Core Facilites