As research moves towards larger teams of contributors, all the people involved in the collaborative process of research process must be acknowledged.

The CRediT author statement relies on the Contributor Roles Taxonomy to clearly describe the range of personal contributions that a researcher brings to a collaborative project. The statement helps define what authorship means in the case of scientific research, by broadening the concept to include all intellectual and practical contributors to the final output.

For each contributor, the following basic personal information should then be provided:

Brand et al. (2015) define the CRediT roles as follows:

Term Definition
Conceptualization Ideas; formulation or evolution of overarching research goals and aims
Methodology Development or design of methodology; creation of models
Software Programming, software development; designing computer programs; implementation of the computer code and supporting algorithms; testing of existing code components
Validation Verification, whether as a part of the activity or separate, of the overall replication/ reproducibility of results/experiments and other research outputs
Formal analysis Application of statistical, mathematical, computational, or other formal techniques to analyze or synthesize study data
Investigation Conducting a research and investigation process, specifically performing the experiments, or data/evidence collection
Resources Provision of study materials, reagents, materials, patients, laboratory samples, animals, instrumentation, computing resources, or other analysis tools
Data Curation 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 reuse
Writing - Original Draft Preparation, creation and/or presentation of the published work, specifically writing the initial draft (including substantive translation)
Writing - Review & Editing 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
Visualization Preparation, creation and/or presentation of the published work, specifically visualization/ data presentation
Supervision Oversight and leadership responsibility for the research activity planning and execution, including mentorship external to the core team
Project administration Management and coordination responsibility for the research activity planning and execution
Funding acquisition Acquisition of the financial support for the project leading to this publication

Useful resources

The Turing Way handbook to reproducible, ethical and collaborative data science includes a section on Authorship and Contributions on Academic Articles, with reflections on the ethical aspects of authorship.

This material is derived from the CCG review of good enough practices, released under a CC-BY 4.0 license.