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APA Open Guide

17 Authorship

Specifying each author's roles allows for transparent attribution of credit, especially when papers have many authors. The Tenzing r package or web app app can help you manage this.

You may include a statement of author contributions whether or not the journal requires CRediT statements. Simply include the statement of contributions in the Author Note unless other directions are provided in a journal’s submission guidelines. See the resources section below for tips on preparing CRediT statements.

17.1 Roles

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

17.2 Resources