This review of the literature presents an overview of the last 50 years of research on acknowledgments in the context of scholarly communication. Through qualitative coding and bibliometric methods, this meta‐synthesis provides an in‐depth description of acknowledgments research and reveals the five main thematic categories that emerge from this corpus of literature. Adopting a historical approach, this review shows a diversified and scattered research landscape. Despite five decades of analysis putting forward the potential value of acknowledgments as markers of scientific capital, the literature still lacks consensus as to the value and functions of acknowledgments within the reward system of science.