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Drafting Authorship Contribution Statement: Best practices for academic publications

By charlesworth author services.

In the academic publishing landscape, authorship attribution stands as a cornerstone of recognition and accountability. However, amidst the complexities of collaborative research and evolving publication norms, crafting clear and equitable authorship statements can become a daunting task for even the most seasoned scholars. 

An authorship statement clarifies the roles and contributions of each researcher in conducted research. It plays a pivotal role in determining the accountability of the research published. Unfortunately, the rules around authorship are not always clear. Hence, as a researcher striving to establish your reputation, it is important to be well-versed with the ethical guidelines present for authorship.

Defining Authorship

A foundational set of authorship criteria has been established by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE). According to the ICMJE, an individual must meet four essential requirements to qualify as an author of a research publication:

Substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work, or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data for the work.

Drafting the work or revising it critically for important intellectual content.

Final approval of the version to be published.

Accountable for all aspects of the work ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.

These guidelines help ensure that authorship is reserved for those who have made significant intellectual contributions and can take responsibility for the integrity of the research. However, the process of determining authorship is not always straightforward, especially for large collaborative projects.

ICMJE further emphasises that the individuals conducting the work should collectively identify who  meets the authorship criteria , ideally at the start of the project. This collaborative approach allows for open dialogue among colleagues. If the research team cannot agree on the authorship order, the issue should then be escalated to the institutions where the work was performed. 

Significance of Transparent Authorship

Establishing clear authorship contribution statements serves several important purposes.

• Enhancing Reader Understanding

Detailed authorship statements provide readers with a transparent overview of each author's specific role, allowing them to better evaluate the credibility and reliability of the research. It can be particularly valuable for interdisciplinary studies or large collaborative projects, where the individual contributions may not be immediately evident.

• Preventing Unethical Practices

It helps prevent unethical authorship practices, such as guest authorship (including individuals who did not meet the criteria) or ghost authorship (omitting individuals who did meet the criteria). These practices undermine the integrity of the scientific literature and can have serious consequences for the individuals involved, both professionally and ethically.

• Ensuring Proper Recognition

Clearly outlining author contributions allows authors to receive appropriate credit for their work, which is essential for career advancement, funding opportunities, and collaborative endeavours. This is particularly important for early-career researchers, who may face challenges in establishing their independent research profiles.

Drafting Authorship Contribution Statement

As the gatekeepers of academic publishing, journals play a crucial role in enforcing standards for authorship. Many of them require authors to provide a detailed authorship contribution statement as part of the submission process. 

The authorship contribution statement should provide readers with a transparent overview of who was responsible for the key aspects of the research, from the initial conception and design to the final write-up and approval.

One of the most adopted frameworks for structuring authorship contribution statements is the Contributor Roles Taxonomy (CRediT). CRediT provides a standardised vocabulary of 14 contributor roles.

• Conceptualisation
• Data Curation
• Formal Analysis
• Funding Acquisition
• Investigation
• Methodology
• Project Administration
• Supervision
• Visualisation
• Writing - Original Draft
• Writing - Review & Editing

Authors can indicate the degree of their contribution for each role (e.g., lead, supporting, or equal) in each area. This level of detail helps readers understand the specific responsibilities and expertise of each individual involved in the research.

Here is an example of an authorship contribution statement using the CRediT system and a general approach:

Example of CReditT system:

Emily Davis: Conceptualisation (lead), Methodology (supporting), Validation (equal), Writing - Original Draft (lead), Writing - Review & Editing (equal).

Michael Smith: Conceptualisation (supporting), Investigation (lead), Formal Analysis (lead), Data Curation (equal), Writing - Review & Editing (equal).

Robert Snow: Resources (lead), Supervision (supporting).

Example of general approach:

Emily Davis devised the project, the main conceptual ideas, proof outline, and wrote the manuscript. Michael Smith worked on all of the technical details and performed the numerical calculations for the suggested experiment. Robert Snow worked out the bound for quantum experiments and verified the results.

Promoting Transparency and Integrity in Authorship

Establishing transparent and ethical authorship practices is crucial for maintaining the credibility and trustworthiness of the scientific literature. By adhering to the ICMJE authorship criteria and utilising standardised frameworks like CRediT, researchers can ensure that credit and accountability are properly attributed to research contributions.

When drafting authorship contribution statements, authors should carefully review the target journal's guidelines and follow best practices to avoid immoral authorship practices. By prioritising  fairness and transparency in authorship decisions , the research community can strengthen the integrity of the publication process and foster a more inclusive and collaborative academic environment.

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Authorship and the importance of the author contribution statement

• Published: 31 March 2023
• Volume 42 , pages 655–656, ( 2023 )

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• C. Neal Stewart Jr 1 &
• Gűnther Hahne 2  

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Avoid common mistakes on your manuscript.

Scientists universally agree that scientific articles and authorship are critically important. Ethical guidelines have been established for best practices and transparency in authorship. Nonetheless, it is not uncommon to see significant errors in authorship practices in published papers. The purpose of this article is to clarify whose names should be listed as authors on a Plant Cell Reports paper and to give some practical guidelines when writing the authorship contribution statement.

In short, the corresponding author and the team of authors are responsible to avoid two critical potential errors in authorship. The first type of error happens when a person who made key contributions to a study and manuscript is not named as an author: someone is inadvertently omitted from the author list. The second type of error happens when a person who did not make a substantial contribution is listed as an author: people are unnecessarily added to the author list. This second type of error occurs when favors are granted to people (gift authorship) or senior scientists, administrators, or famous scientists are granted authorship (honorary authorship). Both types of errors, but especially gift and honorary authorship, could conceivably warrant the rejection of a submitted manuscript.

For many years, Plant Cell Reports has adhered to authorship criteria of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE; https://www.icmje.org/recommendations/browse/roles-and-responsibilities/defining-the-role-of-authors-and-contributors.html ).

In short, the four ICMJE criteria for authorship are:

Substantial contributions

Conception/design of the research or

Collection of data or

Data analysis/interpretation AND

Drafting the manuscript or making intellectual contributions on text/revisions AND

Final approval of the manuscript AND

Agreeing to be held accountable for the work.

Please note that accountability is an important concept in science that is a point of emphasis these days as research misconduct appears to be on the rise. It is critical that scientists be aware of the importance of research integrity from the lab bench to publication. Not only should the content of a scientific research paper be accurate, but the author list should be accurate as well.

The authorship contribution statement plays an important role in authorship and accountability. Ideally, the statement should be able to be mapped back to the ICMJE criteria. Figure  1 shows a good example of an ICMJE-mapped author contribution statement.

To the left is a fictional author contribution statement that serves here as a model. The statement is sufficiently detailed to paint a picture of each author’s role in the study and manuscript. The statement can also be mapped to the ICMJE criteria for authorship (to the right) as depicted by the arrows

In submissions to the journal, sometimes we see certain words and phrases in authorship contribution statements that do not belong there: assisted, gave advice, provided funding, made coffee, translated to English, and helped are some examples. None of these words or phrases can be found in the ICMJE criteria and should be avoided in authorship contribution statements.

Given that paper mills are known to buy and sell authorship, and that honorary and gift authorship is also problematic and widespread in science, we, the editors, are increasingly wary of very long author lists and vague authorship contribution statements. It should not be challenging for the editors and peer reviewers to determine if authors meet the criteria for authorship. Also, it should be noted that ChatGPT and other large language models do not fit the criteria for authorship and should also not be listed as authors.

Below are additional resources and tips for authorship:

No changes to authorship can be made after acceptance of a manuscript.

Authors might find that the Contributor Roles Taxonomy (CRediT; https://credit.niso.org/ ) is useful in thinking about roles of authors and when writing author contribution statements.

For articles that are based primarily on the student’s dissertation or thesis, it is recommended that the student is listed as the first author.

Authors are asked to use their Open Researcher and Contributor ID (OCRID; https://ocrid.org ) when submitting manuscripts to Plant Cell Reports. If authors don’t have an ID yet, it can be acquired during the submission process.

If authors become deceased or incapacitated during the writing, submission, or peer-review process, and the co-authors agree that it is appropriate to include the deceased or incapacitated person as an author, co-authors should obtain approval from a (legal) representative, which may be a direct relative of the deceased or incapacitated contributor.

In conclusion, most submissions to Plant Cell Reports are in good faith and appear to be honest in content and intent. We scientists must be vigilant, however, to guard our scientific pursuits and outputs for the benefit of the profession and society. The leadership of Plant Cell Reports remains dedicated to these pursuits, which include assessing the veracity and appropriateness of authorship lists and contribution statements.

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Stewart Jr, C.N., Hahne, G. Authorship and the importance of the author contribution statement. Plant Cell Rep 42 , 655–656 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00299-023-03007-8

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Q: how to draft the authorship contribution statement.

The journal requires that I should provide an "Authorship Contribution" statement when I submit my paper. But the journal website does not provide any template or guidelines about this. What should I do? How can I ensure that the authorship contribution statement I create follows the necessary guidelines?

Please Log In to post an answer.

Many journals ask for a statement mentioning the individual contributions of authors  in a multi-author paper. While some journals provide a form or a template for this purpose, others leave it open for authors. You can check online for a contributorship template provided by some other journal. That will give you a fairly good idea of what to cover. Here is one such template that you can have a look at.

Based on the ICMJE guidelines for authorship criteria, what you need to do is clarify how each author has contributed to the paper. You need to create a list assigning a person’s name against the following roles or tasks:

• Conception or design of the work
• Data collection
• Data analysis and interpretation
• Drafting the article
• Critical revision of the article
• Final approval of the version to be published

Note that the names of all the co-authors should be written for the last point. Once you draft the contributorship statement, make sure to get it signed by all the co-authors before you submit it to the journal. You will also find this ebook useful:  A practical handbook of templates for communicating with the journal

Answered by Editage Insights 30 Mar, 2017

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CRediT author statement

CRediT (Contributor Roles Taxonomy) was introduced with the intention of recognizing individual author contributions, reducing authorship disputes and facilitating collaboration. The idea came about following a 2012 collaborative workshop led by Harvard University and the Wellcome Trust, with input from researchers, the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) and publishers, including Elsevier, represented by Cell Press.

CRediT offers authors the opportunity to share an accurate and detailed description of their diverse contributions to the published work.

The corresponding author is responsible for ensuring that the descriptions are accurate and agreed by all authors

The role(s) of all authors should be listed, using the relevant above categories

Authors may have contributed in multiple roles

CRediT in no way changes the journal’s criteria to qualify for authorship

CRediT statements should be provided during the submission process and will appear above the acknowledgment section of the published paper as shown further below.

*Reproduced from Brand et al. (2015), Learned Publishing 28(2), with permission of the authors.

Sample CRediT author statement

Zhang San:  Conceptualization, Methodology, Software  Priya Singh. : Data curation, Writing- Original draft preparation.  Wang Wu : Visualization, Investigation.  Jan Jansen :  Supervision. : Ajay Kumar : Software, Validation.:  Sun Qi:  Writing- Reviewing and Editing,

Read more about CRediT  here opens in new tab/window  or check out this  article from  Authors' Updat e:  CRediT where credit's due .

Author Contributions and CRediT

Articles may include a statement and metadata that describe the activities of each person who contributed to the article.

CRediT (Contributor Roles Taxonomy) is a high-level taxonomy that can be used to describe the activities of each person in producing a scholarly output. When CRediT information is provided by the author(s), the CRediT roles should be tagged using the <role> element within <contrib> as part of the article metadata.

An author contributions statement is a section of free text that acknowledges the specific contributions of each person. When an author contributions statement is provided it should be tagged using an <sec> element with attribute @sec-type="author-contributions” within <back>.

CRediT metadata and an author contributions statement are optional components that should be tagged if available for an article. If they are both present then they should be consistent with each other. The author contributions statement can contain more detailed information that is not possible to convey in CRediT metadata.

In a typeset PDF for an article CRediT metadata should be displayed in the back of the article under the heading “Author Contributions” and should be rendered from contributor metadata (the information should not be duplicated). If both CRediT metadata and an author-supplied Author Contributions statement are present then the statement should be placed under the same heading and before the CRediT metadata.

Schematron validation rules related to the CRediT taxonomy are listed at JATS-0048

Author Contributions and Acknowledgements

Credit role metadata, conceptualization, data curation, formal analysis, funding acquisition, investigation, methodology, project administration, supervision, visualization, writing – original draft, writing – review & editing, degree of contribution, example 1: incorrect, example 2: credit metadata and author contributions, example 3: author contributions basic statement, example 4: author contributions stating only equal contribution, example 5: author contributions describing each author’s contribution, example 6: author contributions and separate acknowledgements, example 7: author contributions included in acknowledgements, example 8: credit metadata and author contributions with abbreviated contributor names, additional information.

A statement of author contributions may be included in an article as its own acknowledgements section, or as part of the acknowledgements section, in the back of the article before the references list. This statement should be tagged as a paragraph <p> within a <sec> element with attribute sec-type="author-contributions" within <back>. The title of this section should be “Author Contributions” unless the author contributions statement is included with other acknowledgements in one acknowledgements section.

If a statement of author contributions is present and uses CRediT roles, then the CRediT roles should be tagged as metadata in <role> elements. The CRediT metadata in <role> elements must match the author contributions statement.

Depending on the journal’s policy for authorship, it may not be possible for all contributors to be included in the author list in the <contrib-group> in the article metadata. In this situation, the author contributions statement can list all contributors with their CRediT roles (and optionally with their degree of contribution), while the in the article metadata should include CRediT metadata tagged in <role> elements for the contributors who are the authors of the article.

If CRediT information is provided by the author(s), then the <role> element should be used to tag the CRediT information for each contributor in the <contrib> element. Each <role> element should have the name of the CRediT role tagged as text within the <role> element, and have attributes @vocab, @vocab-identifier, @vocab-term, and @vocab-term-identifier that correspond to the CRediT role.

If the Author Contributions statement describes the contributions of each contributor using the CRediT roles, then this information should be used to tag CRediT metadata in <role> elements for each <contrib> in the article metadata.

CRediT Roles

This list shows the <role> element tagging for all 14 CRediT Roles .

Definition: Ideas; formulation or evolution of overarching research goals and aims.

Definition: Management activities to annotate (produce metadata), scrub data and maintain research data (including software code, where it is necessary for interpreting the data itself) for initial use and later re-use.

Definition: Application of statistical, mathematical, computational, or other formal techniques to analyse or synthesize study data.

Definition: Acquisition of the financial support for the project leading to this publication.

Definition: Conducting a research and investigation process, specifically performing the experiments, or data/evidence collection.

Definition: Development or design of methodology; creation of models.

Definition: Management and coordination responsibility for the research activity planning and execution.

Definition: Provision of study materials, reagents, materials, patients, laboratory samples, animals, instrumentation, computing resources, or other analysis tools.

Definition: Programming, software development; designing computer programs; implementation of the computer code and supporting algorithms; testing of existing code components.

Definition: Oversight and leadership responsibility for the research activity planning and execution, including mentorship external to the core team.

Definition: Verification, whether as a part of the activity or separate, of the overall replication/reproducibility of results/experiments and other research outputs.

Definition: Preparation, creation and/or presentation of the published work, specifically visualization/data presentation.

Definition: Preparation, creation and/or presentation of the published work, specifically writing the initial draft (including substantive translation).

Definition: Preparation, creation and/or presentation of the published work by those from the original research group, specifically critical review, commentary or revision – including pre- or post-publication stages.

Schematron validation rules are being updated to support degree of contribution in CRediT metadata.

It is possible for two or more contributors to have the same CRediT role. When more than one contributor has the same CRediT role, each contributor’s degree of contribution may optionally be specified as “equal”, “lead”, or “supporting”.

If a degree of contribution is provided, the degree of contribution should be displayed in parenthesis after the CRediT role and the <role> element should have a @degree-contribution attribute which contains a value of “Equal”, “Lead”, or “Supporting.”

• degree-contribution="Equal"
• degree-contribution="Lead"
• degree-contribution="Supporting"

For example, contributors who equally performed the role of “Writing - review & editing” would each have this <role> within their <contrib> elements:

If two contributors performed the role of “Writing - original draft” with one person leading or performing more of the work and the other person supporting, the lead person would have this <role>:

and the supporting person would have this <role>:

This example of an Author Contributions statement (which was published in article https://doi.org/10.1080/23294515.2020.1818877 ) is incorrect. The problems in this example are:

• The sec-type="author-contributions” attribute was omitted
• Some text from a submission form (“Please provide…") was incorrectly included in addition to the actual statement that was provided by the authors.

Corrected version:

The @id and @disp-level attributes are optional.

In this example, there is CRediT role metadata for each author and an Author Contributions statement. The CRediT role metadata and the Author Contributions statement are consistent with each other.

In this example, the author contributions statement makes a general acknowledgement that all authors contributed and approved the manuscript.

In this example, the author contributions statement states only that all authors contributed equally.

In this example, the authors contributions statement provides a detailed account of each person’s contribution. This statement does not use the CRediT roles.

In this example, the article includes an Acknowledgements section and an Author Contributions section.

In this example, an author contributions statement is included in the acknowledgements section.

• NISO CRediT Contributor Roles Taxonomy
• CRediT Taxonomy JATS for Reuse Recommendation
• ICMJE Defining the Role of Authors and Contributors

Authorship: Giving credit where it’s due

By Alex Holcombe

The modern research landscape does not look like science 300–400 years ago, when scientists like Galileo and Newton worked largely on their own. Today, science is typically a team effort.

When various practices in scientific publishing were established, a solitary researcher would typically both write the report describing the findings and do all the actual research work, so there was no real distinction between author and researcher. Journal policies today reflect that history—the word “authorship” is used to refer to how one gets credit not just for writing about but also for doing research. The authorship criteria that many journals use require that a researcher make contributions to the writing of an article to be listed as an author and thereby to get formal recognition for their contributions.

Projects today frequently depend on the contributions of multiple researchers with distinct skills, such as clinicians, statisticians, database curators, or computational modellers. For some data-intensive projects, many labs are involved, involving dozens of people from around the world. It is not always practical for every researcher involved to make substantial contributions to the writing of the eventual journal article. As a result, the traditional writing criterion for getting full credit risks excluding people, even some whose contribution was critical.

It is important that researchers realize that journals published by APA do not have a writing requirement. As the seventh edition of the APA Publication Manual states, “Authorship encompasses … not only persons who do the writing but also those who have made substantial scientific contributions to a study” (American Psychological Association, 2020, p. 24). This policy allows recognition of all those who made major contributions. There remains one major problem, however, one that can mean that some researchers still will not get the credit they deserve.

The authors on papers in APA and other publishers’ journals traditionally were listed with no explicit information about who did what. Some information might be inferred from the order of the names but without any certainty. In such conditions, many readers may give the lion’s share of credit to the more well-known of the authors. Unfortunately, this can disproportionately impact early-career researchers and members of underrepresented groups.

To facilitate credit going to where it is due, several years ago many journals began to require that teams give some indication of who did what in a brief Author Note or Author Information section. In principle this solved the problem, but there was no standardization of this across journals, making it difficult to aggregate across papers the type of contributions that a researcher makes, or for the information to be indexed in databases. In 2013, a list of 14 contribution types was developed, named the Contributor Roles Taxonomy (CRediT), and later standardized as metadata that publishers could attach to journal articles. A mention of CRediT was added to the seventh edition of the Publication Manual and in 2020 APA became one of the publishers providing journal editors with the ability to use CRediT in their journals.

The 14 contribution types of the CRediT taxonomy include “Conceptualization,” “Formal analysis,” “Software,” “Investigation,” “Writing—original draft,” and “ Writing—review & editing.” These are useful for many types of psychological research, but they are not optimal for all types of research; they were devised with biomedical research in mind. Still, the information they carry about the contributions made to papers can help researchers highlight their talents on their CVs and should help funders and institutions better track and reward the combinations of contributions that yield good science. For these reasons, the seventh edition of the Publication Manual mentions CRediT, and editors of APA journals are now able to adopt the CRediT taxonomy at APA journals.

Another difficulty with authorship is occasional disagreement and misunderstandings among contributors about who will get authorship and why, especially when contributors do not discuss the nature of their roles before it is time to write the paper. The Publication Manual advises collaborators to discuss "as early as practicable in a research project” (American Psychological Association, 2020, p. 24) the tasks involved, who will do them, and whose planned contributions merit authorship.

To facilitate these discussions, and to assist the reporting of which contributions different researchers made, several colleagues and I have created a tool, named tenzing .

Tenzing is named after the explorer Tenzing Norgay who, together with Edmund Hillary, was the first to scale Mount Everest but may not have received as much credit as he deserved. Use of tenzing starts with an online spreadsheet, where researchers can indicate which of the 14 CRediT contribution types they expect to contribute to, or already have, depending upon when the spreadsheet is circulated among the team. This can help remind researchers of their relative roles during the project and may be refined at the end of the project.

Tenzing also assists the author who submits the manuscript to a journal, by collating all the information needed for submission in one place—not only does the spreadsheet have columns for the authors’ full names and contributions, but it also has columns for their affiliations and supporting grants. The idea is that a lead researcher can circulate the spreadsheet among all collaborators early in the project and thus not have to go back to them for information at the time of journal submission. Tenzing outputs its information in multiple formats. It can create a standard APA byline of authors with footnoted affiliations for a title page. And it can create concise text that lists the CRediT contributions of the authors, which is useful for those journals that have not adopted the CRediT standard but do allow contribution statements in an author information or acknowledgments section.

CRediT is likely to evolve as researchers provide feedback on their experiences with using it, and other ways of indicating contributions may also gain popularity. In any case, I hope that researchers will improve how they indicate who did what in the complex enterprise that we call science.

American Psychological Association. (2020). Publication manual of the American Psychological Association (7th ed.). https://doi.org/10.1037/0000165-000

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Defining the Role of Authors and Contributors

Page Contents

• Why Authorship Matters
• Who Is an Author?
• Non-Author Contributors
• Artificial Intelligence (AI)-Assisted Technology

1. Why Authorship Matters

Authorship confers credit and has important academic, social, and financial implications. Authorship also implies responsibility and accountability for published work. The following recommendations are intended to ensure that contributors who have made substantive intellectual contributions to a paper are given credit as authors, but also that contributors credited as authors understand their role in taking responsibility and being accountable for what is published.

Editors should be aware of the practice of excluding local researchers from low-income and middle-income countries (LMICs) from authorship when data are from LMICs. Inclusion of local authors adds to fairness, context, and implications of the research. Lack of inclusion of local investigators as authors should prompt questioning and may lead to rejection.

Because authorship does not communicate what contributions qualified an individual to be an author, some journals now request and publish information about the contributions of each person named as having participated in a submitted study, at least for original research. Editors are strongly encouraged to develop and implement a contributorship policy. Such policies remove much of the ambiguity surrounding contributions, but leave unresolved the question of the quantity and quality of contribution that qualify an individual for authorship. The ICMJE has thus developed criteria for authorship that can be used by all journals, including those that distinguish authors from other contributors.

2. Who Is an Author?

The ICMJE recommends that authorship be based on the following 4 criteria:

• Substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data for the work; AND
• Drafting the work or reviewing it critically for important intellectual content; AND
• Final approval of the version to be published; AND
• Agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.

In addition to being accountable for the parts of the work done, an author should be able to identify which co-authors are responsible for specific other parts of the work. In addition, authors should have confidence in the integrity of the contributions of their co-authors.

All those designated as authors should meet all four criteria for authorship, and all who meet the four criteria should be identified as authors. Those who do not meet all four criteria should be acknowledged—see Section II.A.3 below. These authorship criteria are intended to reserve the status of authorship for those who deserve credit and can take responsibility for the work. The criteria are not intended for use as a means to disqualify colleagues from authorship who otherwise meet authorship criteria by denying them the opportunity to meet criterion #s 2 or 3. Therefore, all individuals who meet the first criterion should have the opportunity to participate in the review, drafting, and final approval of the manuscript.

The individuals who conduct the work are responsible for identifying who meets these criteria and ideally should do so when planning the work, making modifications as appropriate as the work progresses. We encourage collaboration and co-authorship with colleagues in the locations where the research is conducted. It is the collective responsibility of the authors, not the journal to which the work is submitted, to determine that all people named as authors meet all four criteria; it is not the role of journal editors to determine who qualifies or does not qualify for authorship or to arbitrate authorship conflicts. If agreement cannot be reached about who qualifies for authorship, the institution(s) where the work was performed, not the journal editor, should be asked to investigate. The criteria used to determine the order in which authors are listed on the byline may vary, and are to be decided collectively by the author group and not by editors. If authors request removal or addition of an author after manuscript submission or publication, journal editors should seek an explanation and signed statement of agreement for the requested change from all listed authors and from the author to be removed or added.

The corresponding author is the one individual who takes primary responsibility for communication with the journal during the manuscript submission, peer-review, and publication process. The corresponding author typically ensures that all the journal’s administrative requirements, such as providing details of authorship, ethics committee approval, clinical trial registration documentation, and disclosures of relationships and activities are properly completed and reported, although these duties may be delegated to one or more co-authors. The corresponding author should be available throughout the submission and peer-review process to respond to editorial queries in a timely way, and should be available after publication to respond to critiques of the work and cooperate with any requests from the journal for data or additional information should questions about the paper arise after publication. Although the corresponding author has primary responsibility for correspondence with the journal, the ICMJE recommends that editors send copies of all correspondence to all listed authors.

When a large multi-author group has conducted the work, the group ideally should decide who will be an author before the work is started and confirm who is an author before submitting the manuscript for publication. All members of the group named as authors should meet all four criteria for authorship, including approval of the final manuscript, and they should be able to take public responsibility for the work and should have full confidence in the accuracy and integrity of the work of other group authors. They will also be expected as individuals to complete disclosure forms.

Some large multi-author groups designate authorship by a group name, with or without the names of individuals. When submitting a manuscript authored by a group, the corresponding author should specify the group name if one exists, and clearly identify the group members who can take credit and responsibility for the work as authors. The byline of the article identifies who is directly responsible for the manuscript, and MEDLINE lists as authors whichever names appear on the byline. If the byline includes a group name, MEDLINE will list the names of individual group members who are authors or who are collaborators, sometimes called non-author contributors, if there is a note associated with the byline clearly stating that the individual names are elsewhere in the paper and whether those names are authors or collaborators.

3. Non-Author Contributors

Contributors who meet fewer than all 4 of the above criteria for authorship should not be listed as authors, but they should be acknowledged. Examples of activities that alone (without other contributions) do not qualify a contributor for authorship are acquisition of funding; general supervision of a research group or general administrative support; and writing assistance, technical editing, language editing, and proofreading. Those whose contributions do not justify authorship may be acknowledged individually or together as a group under a single heading (e.g. "Clinical Investigators" or "Participating Investigators"), and their contributions should be specified (e.g., "served as scientific advisors," "critically reviewed the study proposal," "collected data," "provided and cared for study patients," "participated in writing or technical editing of the manuscript").

Because acknowledgment may imply endorsement by acknowledged individuals of a study’s data and conclusions, editors are advised to require that the corresponding author obtain written permission to be acknowledged from all acknowledged individuals.

Use of AI for writing assistance should be reported in the acknowledgment section.

4. Artificial Intelligence (AI)-Assisted Technology

At submission, the journal should require authors to disclose whether they used artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted technologies (such as Large Language Models [LLMs], chatbots, or image creators) in the production of submitted work. Authors who use such technology should describe, in both the cover letter and the submitted work in the appropriate section if applicable, how they used it. For example, if AI was used for writing assistance, describe this in the acknowledgment section (see Section II.A.3). If AI was used for data collection, analysis, or figure generation, authors should describe this use in the methods (see Section IV.A.3.d). Chatbots (such as ChatGPT) should not be listed as authors because they cannot be responsible for the accuracy, integrity, and originality of the work, and these responsibilities are required for authorship (see Section II.A.1). Therefore, humans are responsible for any submitted material that included the use of AI-assisted technologies. Authors should carefully review and edit the result because AI can generate authoritative-sounding output that can be incorrect, incomplete, or biased. Authors should not list AI and AI-assisted technologies as an author or co-author, nor cite AI as an author. Authors should be able to assert that there is no plagiarism in their paper, including in text and images produced by the AI. Humans must ensure there is appropriate attribution of all quoted material, including full citations.

Next: Disclosure of Financial and Non-Financial Relationships and Activities, and Conflicts of Interest

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Authorship: inclusion & ethics in global research, consortia authorship, author contribution statements, author identification, author name change.

• Nature Portfolio journals' editorials

Authorship provides credit for a researcher's contributions to a study and carries accountability. Authors are expected to fulfil the criteria below (adapted from McNutt et al ., Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Feb 2018, 201715374; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1715374115; licensed under CC BY 4.0 ):

Each author is expected to have made substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data; or the creation of new software used in the work; or have drafted the work or substantively revised it

AND to have approved the submitted version (and any substantially modified version that involves the author's contribution to the study);

AND to have agreed both to be personally accountable for the author's own contributions and to ensure that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work, even ones in which the author was not personally involved, are appropriately investigated, resolved, and the resolution documented in the literature.

Nature Portfolio journals encourage collaboration with colleagues in the locations where the research is conducted, and expect their inclusion as co-authors when they fulfil all authorship criteria described above. Contributors who do not meet all criteria for authorship should be listed in the Acknowledgements section.

Nature Portfolio journals reserve the right not to consider non-primary research manuscripts that have been authored by medical writers. Writing assistance should be acknowledged in all article types.

Nature Portfolio journals do not require all authors of a research paper to sign the letter of submission, nor do they impose an order on the list of authors. Submission to a Nature Portfolio journal is taken by the journal to mean that all the listed authors have agreed all of the contents, including the author list and author contribution statements. The corresponding author is responsible for having ensured that this agreement has been reached that all authors have agreed to be so listed, and have approved the manuscript submission to the journal, and for managing all communication between the journal and all co-authors, before and after publication. The corresponding author is also responsible for submitting a competing interests' statement on behalf of all authors of the paper; please refer to our competing interests' policy for more information.

It is expected that the corresponding author (and on multi-group collaborations, at least one member of each collaborating group, usually the most senior member of each submitting group or team, who accepts responsibility for the contributions to the manuscript from that team) will be responsible for the following with respect to data, code and materials: (adapted from McNutt et al., Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Feb 2018, 201715374; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1715374115; licensed under CC BY 4.0 ):

• ensuring that data, materials, and code comply with transparency and reproducibility standards of the field and journal;
• ensuring that original data/materials/code upon which the submission is based are preserved following best practices in the field so that they are retrievable for reanalysis;
• confirming that data/materials/code presentation accurately reflects the original;
• foreseeing and minimizing obstacles to the sharing of data/materials/code described in the work
• ensuring that all authors (or group leaders in multi-lab collaborations) have certified the author list and author contributions

At submission, the corresponding author must include written permission from the authors of the work concerned for mention of any unpublished material cited in the manuscript (for example others' data, in press manuscripts, personal communications or work in preparation). The corresponding author also must clearly identify at submission any material within the manuscript (such as figures) that has been published previously elsewhere and provide written permission from authors of the prior work and/or publishers, as appropriate, for the re-use of such material.

After acceptance, the corresponding author is responsible for the accuracy of all content in the proof, including the names of co-authors, addresses and affiliations.

After publication, the corresponding author is the point of contact for queries about the published paper. It is their responsibility to inform all co-authors of any matters arising in relation to the published paper and to ensure such matters are dealt with promptly. Authors of published material have a responsibility to inform the journal immediately if they become aware of any aspects that requires correction.

Any changes to the author list after submission, such as a change in the order of the authors or the deletion or addition of authors, must be approved by every author. Changes of authorship by adding or deleting authors, and/or changes in Corresponding Author, and/or changes in the sequence of authors are not permitted after acceptance of a manuscript. Nature Portfolio journal editors are not in a position to investigate or adjudicate authorship disputes before or after publication. Such disagreements, if they cannot be resolved amongst authors, should be directed to the relevant institutional authority.

The primary affiliation for each author should be the institution where the majority of their work was done. If an author has subsequently moved, the current address may also be stated. Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

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Nature Portfolio journals encourage collaboration with colleagues in the locations where the research is conducted, and expect their inclusion as co-authors when they fulfill all authorship criteria described above.  Contributors who do not meet all criteria for authorship should be listed in the Acknowledgements section.  We urge researchers to carefully consider researcher contributions and authorship criteria when involved in multi-region collaborations involving local researchers so as to promote greater equity in research collaborations.   

We encourage researchers to follow the recommendations set out in the Global Code of Conduct for Research in Resource-Poor Settings when designing, executing and reporting their research and to provide a disclosure statement in their manuscript that covers the aspects listed below (drawn from the Global Code of Conduct)  Editors may at their discretion ask authors to provide a disclosure statement taking these questions into account; the disclosure can be requested during peer review, shared with reviewers and published in the final paper as an “Ethics & Inclusion statement” in the Methods section. Our general policies on Research ethics and Reporting standards can be found here and here .  

Has the research included local researchers throughout the research process – study design, study implementation, data ownership, intellectual property and authorship of publications?

Is the research locally relevant and has this been determined in collaboration with local partners?

Please describe whether roles and responsibilities were agreed amongst collaborators ahead of the research and whether any capacity-building plans for local researchers were discussed.

Would this research have been severely restricted or prohibited in the setting of the researchers? If yes, please provide details on specific exceptions granted for this research in agreement with local stakeholders.

Where appropriate, has the study been approved by a local ethics review committee? If not, please explain the reasons.

Where animal welfare regulations, environmental protection and biorisk-related regulations in the local research setting were insufficient compared to the setting of the researchers, please describe if research was undertaken to the higher standards.

Does the research result in stigmatization, incrimination, discrimination or otherwise personal risk to participants? If yes, describe provisions to ensure safety and well- being of participants.

If research involves health, safety, security or other risk to researchers, describe any risk management plans undertaken.

Have any benefit sharing measures been discussed in case biological materials, cultural artefacts or associated traditional knowledge has been transferred out of the country?

Please indicate if you have taken local and regional research relevant to your study into account in citations.

A collective of authors can be listed as a consortium. If necessary, individual authors can be listed in both the main author list and as a member of a consortium. All authors within a consortium must be listed at the end of the paper. If it is necessary to include a list of consortium members that did not directly contribute to the paper, this list can be placed in the Supplementary Information. To facilitate submission of manuscripts with large author lists, please consult the journal editor before submission.

Nature Portfolio journals encourage transparency by publishing author contribution statements. Authors are required to include a statement of responsibility in the manuscript, including review-type articles, that specifies the contribution of every author. The level of detail varies; some disciplines produce manuscripts that comprise discrete efforts readily articulated in detail, whereas other fields operate as group efforts at all stages. Author contribution statements are included in the published paper. This Nature Editorial describes the policy in more detail.

Nature Portfolio journals also allow one set of co-authors to be specified as having contributed equally to the work and one set of co-authors to be specified as having jointly supervised the work. Other equal contributions are best described in author contribution statements. Corresponding authors have specific responsibilities (described above).

As part of our efforts to improve transparency and unambiguous attribution of scholarly contributions, corresponding authors of published papers must provide their Open Researcher and Contributor Identifier (ORCID) iD; co-authors are encouraged to provide ORCiD iDs. More information about Springer Nature’s support for ORCiD iDs and journals participating in the ORCiD mandate can be found here .

An author who has changed their name for reasons such as gender transition or religious conversion may request for their name, pronouns and other relevant biographical information to be corrected on papers published prior to the change.  The author can choose for this correction to happen silently, in which case there will be no note flagging the change on either the pdf or the html of the paper, or alternatively they may do so by a formal public Author Correction.

For authors who’ve changed their name and wish to correct it on their published works, please see SNCS Contact Form: Inclusive Name Change Policy : Springer Nature Support .

Nature Portfolio journals' editorials:

• New framework aims to improve inclusion and ethics in global research collaborations amid wider efforts to end exploitative practices.  Nature.  Nature  addresses helicopter research and ethics dumping , June 2022.
• Corresponding authors should not neglect their responsibility to a journal or their co-authors. Nature Nanotechnology . A matter of duty , December 2012.
• Why do we need statements to define the contributions made by each author? Nature Photonics. Contributors, guests, and ghosts , June 2012.
• Nature Nanotechnology. The responsibilities of authors.
• Nature Cell Biology. Attribution and accountability .
• Nature Physics . What did you do?
• Nature Photonics. Combating plagiarism.
• Nature. Authorship policies.
• Individual contributions should be carefully evaluated when compiling the author list of a scientific paper. Nature Materials. Authorship matters, February 2008.
• How the responsibilities of co-authors for a scientific paper's integrity could be made more explicit. Nature . Who is accountable? 1 November 2007.
• The problems of unjustified authorship. Nature Materials . Authorship without authorization , November 2004.

Nature is encouraging authors of papers to say who did what. Nature . Author contributions , 3 June 1999.

Quick links

• Explore articles by subject
• Guide to authors
• Editorial policies

• Insights blog

Defining authorship in your research paper

Co-authors, corresponding authors, and affiliations, why does authorship matter.

Authorship gives credit and implies accountability for published work, so there are academic, social and financial implications.

It is very important to make sure people who have contributed to a paper, are given credit as authors. And also that people who are recognized as authors, understand their responsibility and accountability for what is being published.

There are a couple of types of authorship to be aware of.

Co-author Any person who has made a significant contribution to a journal article. They also share responsibility and accountability for the results of the published research.

Corresponding author If more than one author writes an article, you’ll choose one person to be the corresponding author. This person will handle all correspondence about the article and sign the publishing agreement on behalf of all the authors. They are responsible for ensuring that all the authors’ contact details are correct, and agree on the order that their names will appear in the article. The authors also will need to make sure that affiliations are correct, as explained in more detail below.

Open access publishing

There is increasing pressure on researchers to show the societal impact of their research.

Open access can help your work reach new readers, beyond those with easy access to a research library.

How common is co-authorship and what are the challenges collaborating authors face? Our white paper  Co-authorship in the Humanities and Social Sciences: A global view explores the experiences of 894 researchers from 62 countries.

If you are a named co-author, this means that you:

Made a significant contribution to the work reported. That could be in the conception, study design, execution, acquisition of data, analysis and interpretation, or in all these areas.

Have drafted or written, substantially revised or critically reviewed the article.

Have agreed on the journal to which the article will be submitted.

Reviewed and agreed on all versions of the article before submission, during revision, the final version accepted for publication, and any significant changes introduced at the proofing stage.

Agree to take responsibility and be accountable for the contents of the article. Share responsibility to resolve any questions raised about the accuracy or integrity of the published work.

Every submission to our medical and health science journals should comply with the International Committee on Medical Journal Ethics’  definition of authorship .

Please include any other form of specific personal contribution in the acknowledgments section of your paper.

Affiliations: get it right

Your affiliation in the manuscript should be the institution where you conducted the research. You should also include details of any funding received from that institution.

If you have changed affiliation since completing the research, your new affiliation can be acknowledged in a note. We can’t normally make changes to affiliation after the journal accepts your article.

Changes to authorship

Authorship changes post-submission should only be made in exceptional circumstances, and any requests for authors to be removed or added must be in line with our authorship criteria.  

If you need to make an authorship change, you will need to contact the Journal Editorial Office or Editorial team in the first instance. You will be asked to complete our Authorship Change request form ; all authors (including those you are adding or removing) must sign this form. This will be reviewed by the Editor (and in some instances, the publisher). 

Please note any authorship change is at the Editor’s discretion; they have the right to refuse any authorship change they do not believe conforms with our authorship policies. 

Some T&F journals do not allow any authorship changes post-submission; where this is applicable, this will be clearly indicated on the journal homepage or on the ‘instructions for authors’ page. 

If the corresponding author changes before the article is published (for example, if a co-author becomes the corresponding author), you will need to write to the editor of the journal and the production editor. You will need to confirm to them that both authors have agreed the change.

Requested changes to the co-authors or corresponding authors following publication of the article may be considered, in line with the  authorship guidelines issued by COPE , the Committee on Publication Ethics. Please  see our corrections policy  for more details. Any requests for changes must be made by submitting the completed  Authorship Change Request form .

Authorship Change Request form

Important: agree on your corresponding author and the order of co-authors, and check all affiliations and contact details before submitting.

Taylor & Francis Editorial Policies on Authorship

The following instructions (part of our  Editorial Policies ) apply to all Taylor & Francis Group journals.

Corresponding author

Co-authors must agree on who will take on the role of corresponding author. It is then the responsibility of the corresponding author to reach consensus with all co-authors regarding all aspects of the article, prior to submission. This includes the authorship list and order, and list of correct affiliations.

The corresponding author is also responsible for liaising with co-authors regarding any editorial queries. And, they act on behalf of all co-authors in any communication about the article throughout: submission, peer review, production, and after publication. The corresponding author signs the publishing agreement on behalf of all the listed authors.

AI-based tools and technologies for content generation

Authors must be aware that using AI-based tools and technologies for article content generation, e.g. large language models (LLMs), generative AI, and chatbots (e.g. ChatGPT), is not in line with our authorship criteria.

All authors are wholly responsible for the originality, validity and integrity of the content of their submissions. Therefore, LLMs and other similar types of tools do not meet the criteria for authorship.

Where AI tools are used in content generation, they must be acknowledged and documented appropriately in the authored work.

Changes in authorship

Any changes in authorship prior to or after publication must be agreed upon by all authors – including those authors being added or removed. It is the responsibility of the corresponding author to obtain confirmation from all co-authors and to provide a completed Authorship Change Request form to the editorial office.

If a change in authorship is necessary after publication, this will be amended via a post-publication notice. Any changes in authorship must comply with our criteria for authorship. And requests for significant changes to the authorship list, after the article has been accepted, may be rejected if clear reasons and evidence of author contributions cannot be provided.

Assistance from scientific, medical, technical writers or translators

Contributions made by professional scientific, medical or technical writers, translators or anyone who has assisted with the manuscript content, must be acknowledged. Their source of funding must also be declared.

They should be included in an ‘Acknowledgments’ section with an explanation of their role, or they should be included in the author list if appropriate.

Authors are advised to consult the  joint position statement  from American Medical Writers Association (AMWA), European Medical Writers Association (EMWA), and International Society of Medical Publication Professionals (ISMPP).

Assistance with experiments and data analysis

Any significant contribution to the research reported, should be appropriately credited according to our authorship criteria.

If any parts of the research were outsourced to professional laboratories or to data analysts, this should be clearly stated within the manuscript, alongside an explanation of their role. Or, they should be included in the author list if appropriate.

Authors are responsible for retaining all of the original data related to their work, and should be prepared to share it with the journal editorial office if requested.

Acknowledgments

Any individuals who have contributed to the article (for example, technical assistance, formatting-related writing assistance, translators, scholarly discussions which significantly contributed to developing the article), but who do not meet the criteria for authorship, should be listed by name and affiliation in an ‘Acknowledgments’ section.

It is the responsibility of the authors to notify and obtain permission from those they wish to identify in this section. The process of obtaining permission should include sharing the article, so that those being identified can verify the context in which their contribution is being acknowledged.

Any assistance from AI tools for content generation (e.g. large language models) and other similar types of technical tools which generate article content, must be clearly acknowledged within the article. It is the responsibility of authors to ensure the validity, originality and integrity of their article content. Authors are expected to use these types of tools responsibly and in accordance with our editorial policies on authorship and principles of publishing ethics.

Biographical note

Please supply a short biographical note for each author. This could be adapted from your departmental website or academic networking profile and should be relatively brief (e.g. no more than 200 words).Authors are responsible for retaining all of the original data related to their work, and should be prepared to share it with the journal editorial office if requested.

Author name changes on published articles

There are many reasons why an author may change their name in the course of their career. And they may wish to update their published articles to reflect this change, without publicly announcing this through a correction notice. Taylor & Francis will update journal articles where an author makes a request for their own name change, full or partial, without the requirement for an accompanying correction notice. Any pronouns in accompanying author bios and declaration statements will also be updated as part of the name change, if required.

When an author requests a name change, Taylor & Francis will:

Change the metadata associated with the article on our Taylor & Francis Online platform.

Update the HTML and PDF version of the article.

Resupply the new metadata and article content to any abstracting and indexing services that have agreements with the journal. Note: such services may have their own bibliographic policies regarding author name changes. Taylor \u0026amp; Francis cannot be held responsible for controlling updates to articles on third party sites and services once an article has been disseminated.

If an author wishes for a correction notice to be published alongside their name change, Taylor & Francis will accommodate this on request. But, it is not required for an author name change to be made.

To request a name change, please contact your Journal’s Production Editor or contact us.

Taylor & Francis consider it a breach of publication ethics to request a name change for an individual without their explicit consent.

Additional resources

Co-authorship in the Humanities and Social Sciences  – our white paper based on a global survey of researchers’ experiences of collaboration.

Discussion Document: Authorship  – produced by COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics), this updated guide includes practical advice on addressing the most common ethical issues in this area

Taylor & Francis Editorial Policies

Ethics for authors  – guidelines, support, and your checklist.

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Documenting contributions to scholarly articles using CRediT and tenzing

Alex O. Holcombe

1 School of Psychology, University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia

Marton Kovacs

2 Institute of Psychology, ELTE, Eotvos Lorand University, Budapest, Hungary

Frederik Aust

3 University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany

4 University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands

Balazs Aczel

Associated data.

The source code is archived at http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3993411 .

Scholars traditionally receive career credit for a paper based on where in the author list they appear, but position in an author list often carries little information about what the contribution of each researcher was. “Contributorship” refers to a movement to formally document the nature of each researcher’s contribution to a project. We discuss the emerging CRediT standard for documenting contributions and describe a web-based app and R package called tenzing that is designed to facilitate its use. tenzing can make it easier for researchers on a project to plan and record their planned contributions and to document those contributions in a journal article.

Introduction

Scholarly journal articles evolved from letters penned by individuals reporting scientific observations or experiment results. These letters listed only a single author, and it was clear that that person was claiming credit for all aspects of the work reported.

Today, over three hundred years later, most science is done by groups of people, not by lone individuals [ 1 ]. Different members of the team usually have different roles. Yet until recently, journals still operated as if there was no need to provide any information other than a list of names—the author list. Some information could be tentatively inferred from the order of names in the list, but how order is determined reflects often-unwritten practices around authorship that can be obscure to people outside a subfield and can differ substantially between labs [ 2 ].

When uncertain, people fall back on their prior beliefs. This is unfortunate for junior authors who do not have many papers to their name: when people see a list of authors with no explicit indication of who did what, they may give an outsize amount of credit to the senior author.

Fortunately, over the last few decades, many journals have begun to encourage, and some to require, that teams give some indication of who did what in the work reported by a paper. In some journals, this is done in a brief “Author Note” or “Author Information” section [e.g., 3 ]. Thanks to this development, researchers are more likely to get the specific recognition they deserve.

The included information would ideally be utilized by funders of scientists to allocate resources more effectively, so that teams with the right combination of skills would more often be supported. Moreover, those who hire scientists, such as universities and research institutes, should be able to assemble more effective teams for particular disciplines and projects.

Unfortunately, these potential benefits have been held back by a lack of standardization. Without a consistent vocabulary for describing what each researcher did in a project, and without a structured format for that information, it is difficult to aggregate across papers the type of contributions a researcher makes. For institutions and funders interested in supporting the right combinations of people, it is difficult to tally the sorts of contributions typically involved in different sorts of projects.

This issue is also faced by business and industry, where some solutions were devised. For commercial music for example, the recording industry uses an International Standard Musical Work Code (ISWC). This contains metadata for musical works that provide the identities of contributors and indicates whether they served the roles of, for example, composer, lyricist, or arranger [ 4 , 5 ]. A search of the associated ISWC database allows people to find the works that a musician has contributed to and what their role was in each work ( http://iswcnet.cisac.org/ ).

In scientific research, roles may not be as clear cut as typical in the music industry. Nonetheless, useful distinctions can be made, such as contributions to the analysis of data versus to the drafting of a manuscript, or to the acquisition of data.

In 2014, the first formal taxonomy was developed for scientific research—CRediT, the Contributor Role Taxonomy [ 6 ]. CRediT defines fourteen different types of contributions ( Table 1 ), and over the last several years, it has been taken up by hundreds of journals [ 7 ] and dozens of publishers (see http://credit.niso.org/adopters/ ) and been endorsed by a number of journal editors [ 8 ].

The use of CRediT not only can provide better documentation of the contributions of individual researchers, but also it enables meta-scientific research, such as into the different distribution of contributions indicated for women and men [ 9 ].

To facilitate researcher reporting of contributorship information in manuscripts and journal articles, we created tenzing , a web app and R package [ 10 ] for researchers and publishers. In the following, we will review how journals are currently using and reporting CRediT information. We then explain how tenzing can facilitate researcher and journal use of CRediT. Finally, we describe broader issues associated with CRediT contributorship that should be addressed as fields move forward with the usage of contributorship.

How publishers are using CRediT

The CRediT standard includes a specification for how to report contributorship information in the metadata that is associated with manuscript webpages (JATS-XML). But many publishers do not yet have the capability to do this. For example, it appears that none of the organizations behind preprint servers currently create CRediT metadata in JATS-XML format. In such cases, it can be useful for researchers to publish CRediT information in plain text in their manuscripts. Many journals make no mention of CRediT but ask researchers to indicate what each author did in the “Author Note” or similar section of the manuscript. Researchers can use CRediT to do this, in their preprints and in their submitted manuscripts.

An increasing number of scientific journals offer authors forms to indicate which CRediT category each author contributed to. For example, in the submission interface of eLife , authors encounter an array of checkboxes to indicate which category each author contributed to ( Fig 1 ).

PLOS journals provide a similar facility ( Fig 2 ), as do over 1200 Elsevier journals ( https://www.elsevier.com/about/press-releases/corporate/elsevier-expands-credit-approach-to-authorship ).

It appears when one is asked to enter information about each author.

Many authors encounter the CRediT roles for the first time when they are submitting to a journal. Or even if an author has used CRediT for a previous paper, they may be unlikely to explicitly consider these roles for a new paper until the time of journal submission. From multiple perspectives, not considering contributor roles until the time of submission is not ideal.

By the time an author submits a manuscript, the associated research project sometimes was completed months or even years before. At the time of journal submission, memory of each collaborator’s contributions may be fuzzy. Ideally, authors will arrive at a consensus regarding who did what. But even if memories and records are adequate for this task, establishing such a consensus necessitates interruption of the submission of the manuscript until the submitting author hears from all the other authors and works to resolve any disagreement about various contributions, such as who contributed to the original draft of the manuscript.

Unfortunately, there is reason to believe that, when not discussed until after project completion, the rate of disagreement regarding author contributions may be high. Surveys suggest that between between a third and two-thirds of researchers have been involved in authorship disagreements [ 11 – 14 ]. In many fields, the submitting author is often the most junior author. This is typically the case when a PhD student submits her first paper, for example. Yet a student or other junior author is not in the best position to arbitrate disputes or push back on project contributors who may be overclaiming regarding their contribution [ 15 ]. For this and other reasons, there are many recommendations that authors communicate more about authorship expectations and roles, and that they should do so at the beginning of a project [ 16 – 19 ]. This may be even more important when the manuscript is to provide not only a list of author names, but also a specification of each author’s contributions.

Most authorship disputes are settled informally, but still may leave some people bitter at being excluded, or resentful that some people were included on an authorship list without any evidence they deserved it. The same likely applies to disputes over which contribution categories a researcher contributed to. It is probably best to get some agreement on these at the beginning of a project, so that researchers can proceed with some confidence around both what they are expected to do and what kind of credit they will get for it.

To facilitate project and credit attribution planning, an “authorship grid” system was described by Philippi et al. [ 20 ]. Each row of the grid is a task category or high-level responsibility associated with the project, and the columns are the researchers. At the intersection of the rows and columns, researchers indicate the more specific tasks they plan to perform, if any, in that category. This approach is likely very useful for complex projects. For CRediT-using journals, this needs to be translated into CRediT information, which tenzing can facilitate.

How tenzing helps authors use CRediT

tenzing is a web app and associated R package that allows researchers to record contributorship information at any time, for eventual provision to a journal. The app is named after the mountaineer Tenzing Norgay, who together with Edmund Hillary was the first to reach the summit of Mount Everest. Norgay arguably received less credit than was appropriate given his contribution.

Here we will describe the use of tenzing solely in terms of the web app ( https://martonbalazskovacs.shinyapps.io/tenzing/ ), although one can also use it via the underlying R package ( https://github.com/marton-balazs-kovacs/tenzing )—full documentation for tenzing can be found online at https://marton-balazs-kovacs.github.io/tenzing/ .

Use of tenzing starts with a spreadsheet template (provided as a Google Sheet, http://bit.ly/tenzingTemplate , but one can also use it in any spreadsheet editor, such as Excel). For a given research project, researchers make a copy of the template and then, in the rows, enter the names of their collaborators ( Fig 3 ). One column is dedicated to each of the fourteen CRediT categories, to be checked off to indicate which categories each researcher contributed to. Because some CRediT categories are not entirely self-explanatory, one can hover the cursor over the column names to see some additional defining information.

Around the time of the start of a project, a lead researcher may choose to send the link to the Sheet to all those involved, who can then indicate the areas they plan to contribute to. At the end of the project, or when plans change during the project, this Sheet can be revisited. Google Sheet services track the changes made in the template, thus by visiting the version history one can review the evolution of contributorship roles throughout the project.

When the researchers are ready to submit to a journal, they upload their filled-out spreadsheet to the tenzing app. They can then click a button to generate any of various outputs.

For CRediT, tenzing outputs a brief report in the form of a list indicating which contributor did what ( Fig 4 ). This can be pasted into the section known at some journals as the Author Note. It is particularly appropriate for journals whose publishing platform does not support the machine-readable CRediT metadata. For example, the journal Collabra : Psychology encourages researchers to provide CRediT information in the “Author Contributions” section, because their publisher has not yet implemented creation of CRediT metadata in the article contents.

The publishing platforms used by dozens of publishers can include CRediT metadata in JATS-XML-format in the journal article webpages (see http://credit.niso.org/implementing-credit/ ). tenzing can generate this JATS-XML information itself for users to download ( Fig 5 ). Ideally, researchers would be able to upload this to a journal submission portal when submitting their manuscript, obviating the need to fill in arrays of checkboxes for each contributor. Unfortunately, at present no journal is capable of processing the uploaded JATS-XML, although a few publishers have privately indicated that they’re interested in adding support for this.

Some researchers write manuscripts in R Markdown and use the papaja package [ 21 ] to generate manuscripts in APA format for submission to a journal. tenzing generates author metadata in YAML-format, which can be included in the R Markdown file. papaja then includes the CRediT information in the Author Note section of the APA-formatted manuscript.

The current user interface for tenzing is shown in Fig 6 , although its design is likely to evolve–a usability study is presently underway.

The bottom portion of both sides describes the four outputs that tenzing provides.

An additional output provided by tenzing is unrelated to CRediT: a list of the authors’ names, with annotations indicating the institutions they are affiliated with, formatted to be suitable to paste into the title page of a manuscript file ( Fig 7 ). For manuscripts with large numbers of authors, this can substantially reduce the time required to create the title page.

The current version of tenzing has various limitations, such as only allowing entry of one affiliation per author. Addressing this and a few other features is currently planned, with updates regarding progress available at the development site ( https://github.com/marton-balazs-kovacs/tenzing/issues ). User interface professionals have provided some suggestions, which will likely result in improvements to the app’s design and usability. tenzing is open source [ 10 ], and researchers and other community members are invited to contribute to tenzing development by posting feature requests and bug reports at the Github issues page ( https://github.com/marton-balazs-kovacs/tenzing/issues ) or by contacting the corresponding author.

The future of CRediT

The CRediT standard was primarily designed to allow researchers to indicate what type of contribution they made. However, it also has a facility that allows one to indicate the degree of contribution. Specifically, one can optionally indicate whether each contributor to a particular category played a “lead”, “equal”, or “supporting” role in the associated work. It appears that most journals that use CRediT have opted not to use this feature, at least not yet. Editorial Manager, a journal platform used by thousands of journals, has integrated the degree of contribution feature but as a specific configuration, and most journals using Editorial Manager currently do not appear to have activated it.

An unresolved issue with CRediT’s degree of contribution facet is how it should be used. It seems likely that if the “equal” degree is used, it must be used for multiple co-authors as it may not make sense when applied to just one. This is not currently addressed, however, by the CRediT documentation, nor are other possible constraints such as whether “equal” can be used as an intermediate indicator in cases where there are already authors with the “lead” and “supporting” labels. In addition, there is no indication to publishers of how they should indicate degrees of contribution in the machine-readable JATS-XML associated with journal articles, although Aries Systems, the creator of Editorial Manager, has done this by using the “specific-use” attribute (Caroline Webber, personal communication, 8 July 2020).

The degree of contribution under-specification is one of the issues that will likely be addressed by the group convened by the American National Information Standards Organization to formalize CRediT as an ANSI/NISO standard ( https://niso.org/press-releases/2020/04/niso-launches-work-contributor-role-taxonomy-credit-initiative ). For now, we have chosen to not yet implement the degree of contribution feature in tenzing .

The future of contributorship

The number of contributors to the average scientific paper has steadily increased over the last several decades [ 22 , 23 ]. In part, this has occurred because as knowledge in an area increases, specialization facilitates further advances. Some forms of research today, such as systematic reviews and meta-analyses, are based on bringing together large amounts of evidence from the literature. Library professionals contribute to some such projects with sophisticated searches of papers and databases. For other projects, technicians provide invaluable guidance regarding equipment, programmers create needed software, statisticians provide statistical advice, and informaticists create visualizations or collate information from databases. With science increasingly depending on these tasks getting done, funders need to be able to assess what sorts of projects have most benefited from specialists in order to resource science most effectively. However, people in these specialist roles are often not included in author lists, making it difficult to determine the number of specialists contributing to various projects.

One obstacle to greater inclusion of specialist contributors is the current state of journal authorship guidelines. The authorship guidelines for thousands of journals are based on the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors. These guidelines stipulate that only those who contribute to the writing or revising of a manuscript are eligible for authorship [ 24 ]. Journals should consider expanding authorship eligibility, for example by adopting the proposal of McNutt et al. [ 8 ] to eliminate the writing requirement and endorse the use of CRediT [ 25 ].

Some fields, such as genomics, already have a tradition of including groups, often known as consortia, on an author list, without enumeration of individual researcher names. This is often used to indicate those who only contributed data, which is a useful alternative to making that particular distinction with CRediT [ 26 ].

CRediT is not a good fit for all disciplines or even all projects within a discipline [ 27 ]. An ontology of roles that is both broader than those of CRediT and also more specific has been developed by the National Center for Data to Health, an initiative of the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) at the National Institutes of Health [ 28 ]. The scheme is called the Contributor Role Ontology (CRO, https://data2health.github.io/contributor-role-ontology/ ), and it extends the CRediT ontology to include more than fifty roles, including “specimen collection”, “librarian”, “community engagement”, “coordination”, and “software testing” [ 28 – 30 ]. Given the adoption of CRediT that has already occurred, we anticipate that improvements will occur via extensions or generalizations such as CRO. The CRO scheme could be integrated into tenzing in the future.

If author contributions to a journal’s articles are explicitly indicated by a contributorship taxonomy such as CRediT or CRO, how should one think about the order of authorship? One might expect order to still be used for communicating the relative amount that different authors contributed, despite its limitations due to ambiguity around interpreting the meaning of first author and last author in different fields and cultures. However, note that CRediT also allows an indication of degree of contribution, beyond just how many categories a researcher contributed to. Specifically, where multiple individuals serve in the same role, the degree of contribution can optionally be specified as ‘lead’, ‘equal’, or ‘supporting’, but as described in the previous section, the proper usage of as well as the metadata for this has not yet been fully specified in the CRediT standard.

Deciding on order of authorship may get more and more difficult as the number of authors increases. Having a discussion among the researchers to decide this, without a clear decision process, may be unwieldy. Some have suggested a points system for different types of contributions. The American Psychological Association online authorship resources site for several years has included an example “scorecard” that assigns different types of contributions different numbers of points [ 31 ]. For CRediT, one such points system has been created by Mojtaba Soltanlou [ 32 ]. However, the relative value of different sorts of contributions likely differs across projects.

A critically important document for communicating contributions to scholarship is the CV. Traditionally, the extent of different authors’ contributions is communicated entirely by the order of authorship. In the future, however, we anticipate that funders or individual researchers will move to CVs that communicate the nature of the contributions made to each journal article. The Rescognito site [ 33 ] has created experimental visualizations, as did Ebersole, Adie, & Cook in a SIPS hackathon [ 25 ] with a bar graph indicating, for each CRediT category, how many papers a researcher contributed to.

Another piece of infrastructure already supporting CRediT usage is the ORCiD database and metadata for identifying researchers and linking them to their papers and other scholarly contributions [ 34 ]. Usage has grown rapidly, with over 7,000 papers a month indexed in Crossref because at least one author used ORCiD [ 35 ]. The ORCiD registry includes CRediT information. While tenzing could potentially pull author information such as name, email and affiliation from the ORCiD database rather than requiring manual entry, the selection of the information to import can have complications that require user intervention (for example, one might need to include an old affiliation and not the current one). A prototype shiny app available at https://colomb.shinyapps.io/contributorlist_creator/ facilitates that [ 36 ] and is now compatible with tenzing , as it can be used to create an infosheet one can further complete manually before uploading it into tenzing .

With adoption of CRediT growing rapidly, it is becoming more urgent to attend to any problems being encountered in its use or with the standard itself. The NISO effort to formalize CRediT will include a solicitation of feedback, which will be an important opportunity for the scholarly community to shape how contributorship information is recorded. We hope that the usage of CRediT facilitated by tenzing during the feedback period will result in a greater understanding of what about CRediT should be prioritized for refinement or change.

Acknowledgments

We thank the Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science (SIPS) and the participants in the 2019 SIPS Hackathon on contributorship [ 25 ] for discussion.

Funding Statement

The authors received no specific funding for this work.

Data Availability

• PLoS One. 2020; 15(12): e0244611.

Decision Letter 0

PONE-D-20-23271

Dear Dr. Holcombe,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process.

The manuscript deserves further discussion on specific advantages tenzing has over traditional methods in its aim of finding solutions to the problem of authors' contributions to scientific articles.

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Comments to the Author

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Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

Reviewer #4: Yes

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5. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: The article summarizes advantages and limitations of traditional methods (e.g. “Author Note”, “Author information”) which have been used by scientific journals for many years. Then the authors briefly describe Contributor Role Taxonomy (CRediT) which was developed in 2014. CRediT tool has an advantage over existing methods by being more detailed and structured. CRediT defines 14 different types of author contributions. If this method would be widely adopted by publishers, it could help to provide a better documentation of the contribution of researchers. Finally, the paper presents the new web app and R package (tenzing) which helps to facilitate CRediT tool.

The authors aimed:

1. To revise the current state of how journals use CRediT tool for documentation of author contribution and difficulties associated with the use of CRediT during submission process.

2. To present R package and web app (tenzing) which they developed to overcome these difficulties.

In my opinion, the authors have achieved both aims. The paper summarizes how some journals are currently using new author contribution documentation tool CRediT, and explains difficulties of using it based on illustrative examples. Free web app and R package tenzing, developed by authors, achieves its purpose. Figures included in the paper are very informative and help to understand how tenzing package works.

I find the paper very interesting and I think it would be beneficial to replace traditional author contribution methods by more sophisticated methods such as CRediT in the future.

If the structure of the paper meets the requirements of PLUS ONE journal, then I would suggest accepting the paper.

Reviewer #2: Dear authors,

I thoroughly enjoyed reading your manuscript titled "Documenting contributions to scholarly articles using CRediT and tenzing", discussing the CRediT standard and the associated tenzing R package. The issue of authorship or “contributorship” is timely and deserving of more attention, and the development of software packages and web applications is – in my view – an excellent way of raising discussion while also providing a solution. I only have a few minor suggestions that I hope could improve the manuscript, and the app, even further.

Section: The future of contributorship

It would be interesting to see a bit more discussion raised concerning large(r)-scale projects and group authorship vis-à-vis the CRediT guidelines (e.g., Fontanarosa, Bauchner, & Flanagin, 2017; https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2667044 ). Given that assigning the correct role to authors and collaborators has proven to be difficult, is crediting the entire research group as a whole (and thus no individual authors) perhaps a viable alternative? The specific roles (following, e.g., CRediT guidelines) of each author could then be specified on the group’s website, for instance.

Section: The future of CRediT

It is unfortunate that the “lead”, “equal”, and “supporting” specifications are not more widely adopted, and thus not a feature of tenzing. While I understand your reasons, I hope that you may add such a feature in coming releases. Perhaps showing how it can be done in practice will lead to faster adoption?

The tenzing app

I tested the Shiny app (using Firefox) with an edited template file (edited with LibreOffice Calc on Pop_OS! 20.04 Linux, saved as xlsx). All features worked as intended, with one exception. The papaja YAML output fails to retrieve all roles; all roles are stated as "Conceptualization" (see attachments). I had a look at the code and could not find any obvious source for this error (overall, while browsing through the GitHub repo, I found the code to be clean, consistent, and nicely commented).

While the app works well, apart from the above error, I have two feature suggestions that may encourage quicker adoption by users:

(1) Allow users to create a template from scratch within the Shiny app (thus not having to download a template, edit it, and then upload it). It's a minor issue, but it is always nice to avoid having to move from one program to another. This could be done on a separate tab or page, and the final sheet could shown as a datatable, or similar, to allow editing within the browser (similar to the “Show infosheet” feature, but with editing capabilities). A download button would allow users to save the sheet locally, if need be.

(2) It would be helpful to allow for more than two affiliations. Perhaps this could be a dynamic variable?

Formatting errors

• Line 49, missing abbreviation (ISWC) following mention of International Standard Musical Work Code.

• Line 70, CRediT is misspelled as CrediT.

• Line 169, which is misspelled as whichh.

Best of luck,

Carl Delfin

Reviewer #3: The authors describe a very important tool that appears to solve an emerging problem about authorship and contributions to scholarly articles. Their recommended tool is useful, and would help to initiate change in the way in which scientist conduct and report research/outputs.

However, the “CRediT and tenzing” tool in itself does not solve all the problems. For instance, one challenge that has not been well elucidated is how to fairly document the depth of involvement by an author per category. This will help resolve issues where some authors may contribute to a very great depth in just one category, which may surpass the total contributions from other authors who would be checking the boxes in more categories on the CRediT scale.

Reviewer #4: Comments to the authors:

In this report, the authors discussed the issue with authorship position in scientific publications, which can carry little information about the actual contribution of each co-author. Authors briefly review the emerging CRediT standard for documenting contributions and discuss their web app and R package “tenzing” application that facilitates researcher reporting of contributorship information in manuscripts and journal articles. The topic itself is interesting and scientifically relevant, and could be suitable for the scope of the journal. Some minor comments for the authors:

- The manuscript still needs editing and language revision.

- The manuscript lacks some important references, for example, in the “introduction” section and “how journals are using CRediT”.

- The facility of PLoS journals can be provided as a separate figure e.g. Figure 2 (as for eLife)

- Instead of links to external blogs, I recommend authors to provide tables describing different features of CRediT e.g. limitations and applicability.

Reviewer #5: Thank you for allowing me to read this article in which the authors describe the challenges by informing who did what in the project manuscript. Lack of standardization on how to report contributorship in multi-authored published scholarly works is one of the issues. The authors find this to be particularly problematic since researchers indicate contributions late in the process, namely when submitting a manuscript. They suggest that developing a structured format would help, for instance, be more transparent, and give researchers specific recognition.

Authors describe the use of Contributor Roles Taxonomy (CRediT), developed in 2014, and widely utilized by scientific journals. Authors created a web-based app tenzing designed to make it easier for researchers to plan and record contributions of each team member. The presentation of tenzing is relatively short. Tenzing is a pre-filled Google Sheet (or Excel) template containing all 14 CRediT categories and rows for entering the collaborator’s information. The authors present tenzing as a component that can be used with an existing system (via the underlying R package). Uploading the spreadsheet to the application enables to generate various outputs. The authors provide pictures where they illustrate the use of tenzing on their project. There is no information if other research groups have tested the application.

I would appreciate having more information on how tenzing is advantageous? In what way is this method more superior to existing ones? Is there any possibility to trace the changes researches make in tenzing?

Many different components of the same problem emerge in most parts of the manuscript, which illustrates how multidimensional the question is. At the same time, it would be clearer if authors were to focus on a limited inquiry, what part of the problem do authors want to solve? Another possible alternative is to choose a different article type.

I find the structure of this article unclear. The authors should clarify the following sections: problem definition, proposed solution, discussion, conclusion.

The main strength of this manuscript is that it addresses a timely question with great potential for improvement. I agree with the authors that there is a need to develop methods and strategies to ensure transparency in the research were contribution plays a significant part. But still, there is an unresolved question regarding what approach would solve the particularly chosen part of the issue.

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Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2:  Yes:  Carl Delfin

Reviewer #3: No

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Submitted filename: Reviewer comments.docx

Author response to Decision Letter 0

15 Oct 2020

Dear Dr. Nwaru,

We greatly appreciate the five reviews for our manuscript. This provides a lot of value, and not only due to the constructive suggestions - thanks to PLoS’s option for open peer reviews, which we plan to take up, it also provides a public indication of the extent to which our manuscript was vetted and evaluated.

Response to comment by Napsi Szincsak of PLoS ONE

After the action letter, I received an email from Napsi Szincsak asking us to address the fact that PLoS ONE has specific guidelines on software sharing. We had already cited the Github page, where the source code is archived. We have now also added an MIT license ( https://github.com/marton-balazs-kovacs/tenzing/blob/master/LICENSE.md ).

Response to “journal requirements” comments

-1. Please ensure that your manuscript meets PLOS ONE's style requirements, including those for file naming.

We have adjusted the title page and believe the rest of the manuscript and files comport with the specified style.

-2. In your Data Availability statement, you have not specified where the minimal data set underlying the results described in your manuscript can be found.

That is correct – this is because there is no underlying data set, as there are no results described in the manuscript.

Response to reviewer 1’s comments

We appreciate that the reviewer believes the manuscript is interesting and that it achieves its aims of reviewing the state of author/contribution issues and presenting the R package and app for improving things.

Response to reviewer 2’s comments

We appreciate the reviewer’s praise for the manuscript as well as the multiple detailed “minor suggestions”.

We agree that group (or consortium, as it is sometimes called) authors is a viable alternative to contributor schemes such as CRediT and use of them has become a strong tradition in some fields, such as genomics. Documenting CRediT information on the group’s website, however, would not be considered a great solution as websites are typically not as permanent as journal article records. We were not aware of the JAMA editorial the reviewer provided, which is helpful, so we have added a paragraph on this with that citation to this section.

Indeed, we do think that this is very important to specify in some projects, see some of our discussion here https://github.com/marton-balazs-kovacs/tenzing/issues/15 . As mentioned at the discussion, there is presently no JATS (the underlying machine-readable metadata) specification in CRediT for lead vs. equal vs. supporting, but we expect that the group at the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) presently working on CRediT will address this, which will lead us to move this feature up in the development plan.

I tested the Shiny app… The papaja YAML output fails to retrieve all roles; all roles are stated as "Conceptualization".

This error has since been fixed.

I found the code to be clean, consistent, and nicely commented

We appreciate your gracious comment.

I have two feature suggestions that may encourage quicker adoption by users:

We have been discussing this feature, but implementing spreadsheet functionality within Shiny is currently beyond our programming resources as well as, possibly, the Shiny hosting infrastructure we have access to. However, we have been exploring the feasibility and usability of users entering into Tenzing the Google Doc URL for their contributorship spreadsheet so that users do not need to download and upload a template.

Yes, we have been working on this feature for a while, actually, trying different formats for the interface to avoid creating major usability problems. We hope to have it implemented in the next few months.

• Line 49, missing abbreviation (ISWC) following mention of International Standard Musical Work Code

•Line 70, CRediT is misspelled as CrediT.

Thanks for pointing these out – we have fixed them.

Response to Reviewer 3’s comments

The authors describe a very important tool that appears to solve an emerging problem about authorship and contributions to scholarly articles. Their recommended tool is useful, and would help to initiate change in the way in which scientist conduct and report research/outputs.

Thank you for the positive comments about tenzing.

one challenge that has not been well elucidated is how to fairly document the depth of involvement by an author per category.

We agree that this remains a big challenge. The CRediT standard itself has a way to partially address it, by allowing indication of whether a contributor made a “leading”, “equal”, or “supporting” role, but it is not yet fully implemented by CRediT: There is presently no JATS (the underlying machine-readable metadata) specification in CRediT for lead vs. equal vs. supporting, but we expect that the group at the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) presently working on CRediT will address this, which will likely prompt us to move this feature up in the development plan (see some of our discussion here https://github.com/marton-balazs-kovacs/tenzing/issues/15 ).

Response to Reviewer 4’s comments

The topic itself is interesting and scientifically relevant, and could be suitable for the scope of the journal. Some minor comments for the authors:

Thank you for the positive comments.

We have made many edits to improve the wording, as can be seen in the track changes version.

Thank you for pointing this out - we have now added several references to these sections.

Thank you for the suggestion. We have added a table describing the basic features of CRediT (Table 1), which also provides some indication of CRediT’s limitations.

Response to Reviewer 5’s comments

I would appreciate having more information on how tenzing is advantageous? In what way is this method more superior to existing ones?

One reason that this aspect of the manuscript may have appeared lacking is because we don’t know of any alternative methods to tenzing, in the sense of an easy to use (no programming) tool to facilitate CRediT reporting. To address the reviewer’s comment, however, we have added more references to somewhat related approaches, and have added a paragraph about “authorship grids” to better explicate the unique utility of tenzing.

Is there any possibility to trace the changes researches make in tenzing?

The researchers enter the contributorship information into a Google Sheet (or they can download that and make changes in a spreadsheet of their choice). Google provides a version history that can be reviewed, for example to understand how contributorship roles evolve during the course of the project.

We tentatively agree that doing nearly a complete rewrite of the manuscript with the structure proposed by the reviewer should make it clearer to some readers. However, given that the other four reviewers did not suggest that a rewrite was necessary, we prefer not to make too many changes that might perturb the manuscript in a way that might make the other reviewers less happy. We also agree that ideally, an argument could be made that tenzing is the optimal way to address the needs of researchers and the interests of science broadly. However, we make no such claim in the manuscript – instead we aimed only to explain some of the issues and that tenzing partially addresses some of them. We think that the limited rewrite that we have done makes that a bit more clear.

Submitted filename: responseToReviewers.docx

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How to phrase authors' contributions when the convention is that all team members are authors?

The question.

When a journal (such as one of the Nature family) asks for information about authors' contributions, what is the most effective way to answer this, to ensure that the co-authorship is assigned as intended, and to ensure that reality is represented: that the work is a product of the intellectual environment of the whole team; and that all members have contributed in various degrees to the analytical methods used, to the research concept, and to the experiment design . Is what I've just written there sufficient, or is there a more judicious phrasing that is accepted by heavyweight journal publishers such as the Nature Group?

The context

The primary context is publications from a team that works on the principle that all members of the team are to be named authors on all papers coming out of the team.

I'm very specifically looking for answers from editors who handle such papers; or from members of teams with similar rules. Answers from others are of course possible, but I'd value direct personal experience.

Here's the Vancouver Group's (International Committee of Medical Journal Editors) statement on the subject :

Authorship credit should be based on 1) substantial contributions to conception and design, acquisition of data, or analysis and interpretation of data; 2) drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content; and 3) final approval of the version to be published. Authors should meet conditions 1, 2, and 3. When a large, multicenter group has conducted the work, the group should identify the individuals who accept direct responsibility for the manuscript. These individuals should fully meet the criteria for authorship/contributorship defined above, and editors will ask these individuals to complete journal-specific author and conflict-of-interest disclosure forms. When submitting a manuscript authored by a group, the corresponding author should clearly indicate the preferred citation and identify all individual authors as well as the group name. Journals generally list other members of the group in the Acknowledgments. The NLM indexes the group name and the names of individuals the group has identified as being directly responsible for the manuscript; it also lists the names of collaborators if they are listed in Acknowledgments. Acquisition of funding, collection of data, or general supervision of the research group alone does not constitute authorship. All persons designated as authors should qualify for authorship, and all those who qualify should be listed. Each author should have participated sufficiently in the work to take public responsibility for appropriate portions of the content.

The caveats :

1. My field is not medicine: I've used the Vancouver Group's guidelines, as I haven't yet found any in my field.

2. note that this is emphatically not about the ethics, pros and cons of such a rule. If you want to discuss that, please do so in chat . I may join you there as time allows

Related literature:

• Author contributions audit , by Maxine Clarke on the Nature Nautilus authors' blog, lists example contributors' satements
• Drummond Rennie discusses "Authorship Credits"
• Academia and Clinic, by Yank & Rennie : Disclosure of Researcher Contributions: A Study of Original Research Articles in The Lancet
• and lots more at the US Council of Science Editors
• publications

• 7 I'd suggest asking the editor. It sounds to me like the phrasing in the first paragraph defeats the purpose of asking for author contributions, so I'd guess that the editor may be unhappy with it, but it's not something I have much experience with. I'd assume the editor would also want confirmation that no author is being listed just because the team has a policy of listing all members (but rather than they have all made contributions sufficient to justify authorship according to the journal standards regardless of this policy, and the policy merely reflects this duty for team membership). –  Anonymous Mathematician Commented May 10, 2013 at 15:04
• 1 How does this information appear in other articles published in the same journal? –  cbeleites Commented May 11, 2013 at 16:54

3 Answers 3

If there is a requirement to list the contribution of each author, it seems the ethical way to handle it is, well, to list the contribution of each author. If some authors did not contribute directly to the paper, you should state that.

It is unethical to try to conceal that some authors did not make a direct contribution. Please note: Your team policy is what it is, and I'm not trying to judge the ethics of your team's policy. I'm just saying that, whatever your team's policy is, you must disclose it forthrightly, without evasion. That's exactly the point of disclosure requirements!

(If you're not comfortable stating your team's policy explicitly, that might be a hint that it's time to consider changing the policy -- but until then, you must disclose it frankly and honestly.)

• 1 There is no attempt at concealment or evasion. Please can you suggest a constructive rephrasing if I've mistakenly given that impression? –  410 gone Commented May 10, 2013 at 17:20
• 5 I don't have enough information about the specific team members and how they contributed in your particular situation. But have you considered listing the contribution of each? e.g., X performed the experiment in Section 3, Y and Z performed the experiment in Section 4, X and U formulated the original problem and provided direction and guidance, V provided helpful feedback on an early draft of the paper, W assisted with data analysis. –  D.W. Commented May 10, 2013 at 17:54

Your phrasing is fine, but you could be more explicit. Let's say there are four authors: ABC, DEF, GHI, and JKL. You might say something like

ABC, DEF, GHI, and JKL designed the study, developed the methodology, collected the data, performed the analysis, and wrote the manuscript.

It seems nitpicky, silly, and egregious to go through a paper that may contain dozens of experiments/simulations and list which person did which. That would be akin to noting who wrote each sentence. However, if there is a key component that only a subset of your team participated on, then, as D.W. suggests, it would be unethical not to list it that way:

ABC, DEF, GHI, and JKL designed the study, developed the methodology, performed the analysis, and wrote the manuscript. ABC and GHI collected the data.

You can use the Contributor Roles Taxonomy (or CRediT) approach as a reference to state what was the role of each co-author in your paper. Journals like Plos ONE are adopting this approach or using a modified version. You can read more about this here .

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Solving the "Blind men and the elephant problem": Additive deep learning of complex high dimensional models from partial faceted datasets

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Biological systems are complex networks involving tens of thousands of interacting molecular components, and measurable biological functions are emerging properties of these complex networks. Many quantitative studies in biology attempt to connect biological function with molecular components and genes, in the process developing mechanistic understanding. However, it is challenging to quantify the contribution of all components to the biological function simultaneously, especially at the single cell level. Instead, in typical experiments, only a subset of the variables (or facet) is measured. This makes it difficult to obtain a complete and unbiased understanding of the network and how different components of the network cooperatively contribute to the biological function. In this paper, we explore a machine learning approach to combine different facets of data and obtain a complete picture of the biological system based on conditional distributions from faceted data subsets. Both a polynomial regression approach and a neural network approach are developed and examined with two set of concrete examples: A mechanical spring network system deforming under external forces and a small (8-dimensions) biological network including the cellular senescence marker P53. In the later example, single cell data is collected to validate the machine learning approach. We find that the full system is successfully reconstructed from faceted data in both examples. We further discuss the additive property of the model, where the model predictive accuracy increases with increasing number of simultaneously measured variables (dimension of subsets). Our model provides a systematic and novel approach to integrate different pieces of experimental information to reconstruct complex high dimensional systems, arriving at an unbiased and wholistic model of biological function.

Competing Interest Statement

The authors have declared no competing interest.

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