Why this discipline needs its own guide
Background
Public-health research operates at population scale and typically involves multi-sector partnerships: ministries of health, local authorities, community organisations, advocacy groups, and the academic team that anchors the methodology. CRediT captures the academic contribution well but is less well suited to the stakeholder-engagement contributions that determine whether a public-health intervention works in the field.
The Lancet Public Health, BMJ Global Health, and the American Journal of Public Health all expect CRediT statements. For complex interventions, supplement the statement with an Acknowledgements paragraph naming community partners, lived-experience contributors and implementation-site staff with their specific contribution.
Key considerations
How to assign the roles
- Community-based participatory research partners frequently meet the Conceptualization bar but are not always granted authorship. Where the journal’s policy allows, name them as authors with the CRediT roles they performed.
- Implementation-science contributions to programme adaptation belong under Methodology and Investigation.
- Health-economic evaluations done alongside the primary analysis are Formal Analysis, with the health economist named as a co-author.
- Policy translation, advocacy work and media engagement do not fit the current CRediT vocabulary; record them in the Acknowledgements with the named contributor and contribution.
- For pandemic-response and rapid-evidence papers, distinguish Investigation from Project Administration carefully — the lines blur under time pressure but the roles remain distinct.
Worked example
A representative CRediT statement
Author Contributions (CRediT) E. Mwangi: Conceptualization, Methodology, Investigation, Writing – original draft. J. Romero: Methodology, Formal analysis, Visualization. N. Patel: Investigation, Data curation, Project administration. H. Bergström: Methodology (health economics), Formal analysis. C. Adeyemi: Conceptualization, Supervision, Funding acquisition. Community partners (Acknowledgements): [Organisation A] provided lived-experience input into the intervention design; [Organisation B] hosted the implementation sites.
The role names above match the canonical wording at casrai.org/credit. Most publishers accept exactly this format.
Further reading
