  Current practices of quantifying performance by productivity leads serious
concerns for psychological well-being of doctoral students and influence of
research environment is often neglected in research evaluations.
Acknowledgements in dissertations reflect the student experience and provide an
opportunity to thank the people who support them. We conduct textual analysis
of acknowledgments to build the "academic support network," uncovering five
distinct communities: Academic, Administration, Family, Friends & Colleagues,
and Spiritual; each of which is acknowledged differently by genders and
disciplines. Female students mention fewer people from each community except
for their families and total number of people mentioned in acknowledgements
allows disciplines to be categorized as either individual science or team
science. We also show that number of people mentioned from academic community
is positively correlated with productivity and institutional rankings are found
to be correlated with productivity and size of academic support networks but
show no effect on students' sentiment on acknowledgements. Our results indicate
the importance of academic support networks by explaining how they differ and
how they influence productivity.
