Nature Author Contributions

Nature's author contributions policy requires every submitted paper to include a free-text statement describing each author's role, built on authorship criteria drawn from McNutt et al. (2018) rather than ICMJE's four-part test, and without mandating the CRediT taxonomy for the statement itself. It also permits explicit "contributed equally" and "jointly supervised" co-author designations and prohibits authorship changes after acceptance.

ByCASRAI Editorial Board

· Last updated 18 Jul 2026

Worked examples

Is an instance

A Nature contributions statement reading "A.B. and C.D. conceived the study. A.B. performed the experiments. C.D. wrote the manuscript. All authors reviewed and approved the final version." — free text, no CRediT role tags, following the format Nature's policy describes.

Is an instance

A Nature submission designating two authors as having "contributed equally" and two others as having "jointly supervised the work" — both are explicit designations Nature's authorship policy permits alongside the free-text statement.

Looks similar, but isn't

Not an instance

A Nature manuscript submitted with only an author byline and no contributions statement — the statement is a mandatory manuscript component under Nature's editorial policy, not optional supplementary material.

Not an instance

A request to add a new co-author to a Nature paper after the manuscript has already been accepted — Nature's policy states authorship additions or deletions are not permitted after acceptance; this has to go through a formal post-publication correction instead.

Nature’s author contributions policy requires every submitted paper — including review-type articles — to carry a free-text statement describing what each named author did. Unlike some journals, Nature does not build this requirement on the ICMJE four-criteria authorship test, and it does not mandate the CRediT taxonomy for the statement itself — it uses its own eligibility criteria, drawn from a 2018 framework paper, and leaves the wording of the contributions statement to the authors.

What makes a Nature contributions statement distinct

Four elements separate Nature’s policy from the generic ICMJE/CRediT pattern followed by most biomedical and STEM journals:

Its authorship criteria come from McNutt et al. (2018), not ICMJE. Nature’s policy states each author is expected to have made a substantial contribution 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 approve the submitted version while accepting personal accountability for their own contributions. This wording tracks a framework published by McNutt and colleagues in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2018 (“Transparency in authors’ contributions and responsibilities to promote integrity in scientific publication”), not the ICMJE’s separately maintained four-point test used by most medical journals.
The statement is free text, not a mandated taxonomy. Nature’s editorial policy does not require authors to tag contributions against CRediT’s 14 standardized roles (Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, and so on). Authors write a short narrative paragraph in their own words. This is a real difference from journals and publishers that have adopted CRediT as a structured, mandatory field in the submission system — Springer Nature is a CRediT adopter at the portfolio level, but the flagship Nature journal’s own authorship policy page does not require CRediT tagging as a condition of the contributions statement.
Two specific co-author designations are explicitly permitted. Nature’s policy allows one set of co-authors to be designated as having “contributed equally to the work” and a separate set to be designated as having “jointly supervised the work” — addressing two authorship-order disputes (who was really “first” among equals, who was really senior-most among multiple supervisors) that CRediT’s role vocabulary does not resolve on its own, since CRediT documents contribution type, not contribution order or seniority.
Authorship is locked after acceptance. Nature’s policy states that changes of authorship by adding or deleting authors are not permitted after a manuscript has been accepted. Any correction to the author list after that point has to go through Nature’s post-publication correction mechanisms rather than a routine author-list edit.

Corresponding author responsibilities

Nature’s policy places specific stewardship duties on the corresponding author, beyond simply being the point of contact: ensuring that data, materials, and code comply with the journal’s transparency and reproducibility standards; ensuring that original data, materials, and code are preserved following best practice after publication; managing communication with the journal on behalf of all authors; taking responsibility for the accuracy of all content in the proof; and obtaining permissions for any previously published or unpublished material used in the paper.

Illustrative example (not from a real published paper)

A free-text Nature-style contributions statement, following the format the policy describes rather than any structured taxonomy, might read:

“A.B. and C.D. conceived the study. A.B. performed the experiments and analyzed the data. E.F. contributed new analytical software. A.B. and C.D. wrote the manuscript with input from all authors. C.D. and E.F. jointly supervised the project.”

Note what this format does and does not do: it names who did what in plain language, it uses the “jointly supervised” designation Nature’s policy explicitly permits, but it does not tag any contribution against a fixed vocabulary the way a CRediT-based statement would.

Counter-example: a non-compliant submission

A manuscript submitted to Nature with only a byline and no contributions statement at all does not meet the policy’s requirement — the statement is a mandatory manuscript component, not an optional add-on, and its absence is a submission-completeness issue an editor would flag before peer review begins. A submission that instead reports contributions using PNAS’s older, fixed five-category checklist (see PNAS Author Contributions) would also need to be rewritten as free text for a Nature submission — the two journals’ contribution-disclosure formats are not interchangeable as submitted, even though both are trying to solve the same accountability problem.

How this compares to other journals’ authorship policies

Nature’s approach sits alongside several distinct models already documented on this site: ICMJE‘s four-criteria test is the de facto standard most biomedical journals build their own policy on; ICMJE’s authorship criteria lay out that four-part test in detail; BMJ’s authorship guidelines add a named guarantor and a transparency declaration on top of the ICMJE base; PNAS’s policy moved from a fixed five-category checklist to the full CRediT taxonomy plus its own guarantor and ORCID requirements. Nature’s policy is the outlier among these in citing a different source framework (McNutt et al. rather than ICMJE) and in leaving the statement itself as free text rather than a structured taxonomy. For readers who want to see what a fully CRediT-tagged statement looks like in practice, see CRediT Author Statement Samples.

Related terms

Use in your systems

JATS XML <role> element

xml

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      vocab-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/"
      vocab-term="Nature Author Contributions"
      vocab-term-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/nature-author-contributions" />

Schema.org DefinedTerm (JSON-LD)

json

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