Author contribution statement format

The plain-text format

The author-facing format is simple. Head the section “CRediT authorship contribution statement”, then list each contributor as Name: Role, Role, Role. Use the canonical wording of the 14 CRediT roles exactly, and add the optional lead, equal or supporting qualifier in parentheses where several people share a role. This is the wording recommended by Elsevier, Wiley, Taylor & Francis and Cambridge University Press author guidance.

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Zhang San: Conceptualization (lead), Methodology, Writing – original draft. Priya Patel: Data curation (lead), Investigation, Writing – review & editing. Erin Wright: Formal analysis, Visualization. Adam Lloyd: Supervision, Validation. Maria García-López: Funding acquisition, Writing – review & editing.

Journal-specific placement

Placement is conventionally a dedicated section immediately before the references, after any acknowledgements. However, most major submission systems — Editorial Manager, ScholarOne, eJournalPress and OJS via the CRediT plugin — now collect CRediT through structured per-author fields rather than (or in addition to) free text. When the system offers structured fields, enter the data there: it is the form the publisher carries through to production and deposit. Always check your target journal’s author guidelines, because a growing number require CRediT and specify exactly where the statement belongs.

JATS XML encoding

The Journal Article Tag Suite (JATS) is the dominant XML format for scholarly articles, and since JATS 1.2 (2018) it has a fully specified CRediT encoding. Each role is a <role> element on the author’s <contrib>, carrying vocab="credit", a vocab-identifier, the canonical vocab-term name, the per-role vocab-term-identifier URI, and an optional specific-use attribute for the lead/equal/supporting degree. This is the encoding recommended by JATS4R.

<contrib-group content-type="authors">
  <contrib contrib-type="author">
    <name><surname>Zhang</surname><given-names>San</given-names></name>
    <contrib-id contrib-id-type="orcid">https://orcid.org/0000-0001-2345-6789</contrib-id>
    <role vocab="credit"
          vocab-identifier="https://casrai.org/credit"
          vocab-term="Conceptualization"
          vocab-term-identifier="https://casrai.org/credit/roles/conceptualization"
          specific-use="lead">Conceptualization</role>
    <role vocab="credit"
          vocab-identifier="https://casrai.org/credit"
          vocab-term="Methodology"
          vocab-term-identifier="https://casrai.org/credit/roles/methodology">Methodology</role>
    <role vocab="credit"
          vocab-identifier="https://casrai.org/credit"
          vocab-term="Writing - original draft"
          vocab-term-identifier="https://casrai.org/credit/roles/writing-original-draft">Writing - original draft</role>
  </contrib>
</contrib-group>

The vocab-term must match the canonical role wording, and the vocab-term-identifier resolves to the role’s definition page. For the full schema mapping and JATS4R conformance notes, see CRediT in JATS XML and /implement/jats.

Crossref and DataCite deposit

Crossref added CRediT to its deposit schema, so members can submit one or more role URIs per contributor; once deposited, the roles surface in the Crossref REST API under each work’s contributor records and flow into the citation-graph products that funders and CRIS systems consume. For data and software outputs, DataCite’s contributorType vocabulary overlaps with — but is not identical to — CRediT; the practical rule is to use CRediT for journal articles and book chapters and DataCite contributor types for datasets and software. See /implement/crossref and /implement/datacite.

JSON-LD and ORCID

For non-XML pipelines, CRediT maps onto Schema.org’s Role and roleName properties, which is how discovery systems read contributor information. ORCID supports CRediT roles on contribution records, so when a deposit ties a role to an author’s ORCID iD, that per-publication, per-role credit can appear on their ORCID profile — letting an early-career researcher show, for instance, “Investigation: lead on 12 papers”. See CRediT as JSON-LD and /implement/orcid.

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "ScholarlyArticle",
  "author": [
    {
      "@type": "Person",
      "name": "Zhang San",
      "identifier": "https://orcid.org/0000-0001-2345-6789",
      "roleName": [
        {
          "@type": "DefinedTerm",
          "@id": "https://casrai.org/credit/roles/conceptualization",
          "name": "Conceptualization",
          "inDefinedTermSet": "https://casrai.org/credit"
        },
        {
          "@type": "DefinedTerm",
          "@id": "https://casrai.org/credit/roles/methodology",
          "name": "Methodology",
          "inDefinedTermSet": "https://casrai.org/credit"
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}