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APA Open Guide

8 Authorship

Per the APA Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Toolkit for Journal Editors,

Developed by the Consortia Advancing Standards in Research Administration (CASRAI) and National Information Standards Organization (NISO), CRediT is a high-level taxonomy comprised of 14 contributor roles, each of which can be modified by a degree of contribution (lead, equal, or supporting). The full taxonomy with definitions for each role can be found on the NISO website. Author contribution statements promote equity and inclusion by specifically attributing contributions to each author. Author contribution statements likewise allow for the inclusion of collaborators whose contributions are less obviously represented in the written article, such as colleagues who may have provided input in early stages of an article or who handled more logistical aspects of the research. CRediT is likewise a useful tool for measuring potential inequities in the division of scientific labor by gender or other demographics. For instance, Larivière et al. (2021) offer an analysis on the gender division of labor using CRediT data from PLOS journals.

8.1 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.

8.2 Checklist

  • Does the manuscript include a statement of author roles?
  • Do author roles conform to the CRediT Taxonomy?

8.3 Resources