A contributorship statement is a published account of exactly who did what on a research output, while an ICMJE authorship statement decides who qualifies as an author, and a CRediT statement is the standardised 14-role vocabulary used to write that contributorship account. Editorial staff handling submissions across journal families often have to reconcile all three in the same manuscript. This piece sets out what each one actually requires, where they overlap, and where the gaps sit.
Contributorship is the practice of recording the specific role each named person played in a research output, distinct from the binary question of who is listed as an author.
- What is a contributorship statement?
- How does BMJ’s contributorship model differ from ICMJE authorship criteria?
- Where does a CRediT statement fit in?
- Comparison table: BMJ, ICMJE and CRediT requirements
- How should editorial staff reconcile competing requirements?
- Answer-first Q&A
- What this means going forward
What is a contributorship statement?
A contributorship statement is the section of a published paper — usually at the end, separate from the byline — that describes who contributed what to the planning, conduct and reporting of the work. It can include people who are not listed as authors, such as patients, technicians or methodologists.
The model dates to 1997, when BMJ published the editorial “Authorship is dying; long live contributorship” (BMJ 1997;315:696), arguing that the traditional byline concealed who had actually done the work. BMJ formalised the idea further in “Maintaining the integrity of the scientific record” (BMJ 2001;323:588), which introduced its guarantor requirement.
Contributorship statements are typically free text. That freedom is also their weakness: two journals’ statements for the same paper can describe the same work in incompatible language, which is precisely the reconciliation problem this article addresses.
How does BMJ’s contributorship model differ from ICMJE authorship criteria?
BMJ’s contributorship model and the ICMJE authorship criteria answer different questions. ICMJE decides who is entitled to be called an author; BMJ’s contributorship statement records what every listed contributor — author or not — actually did.
Under the ICMJE Recommendations, a person must meet all four of the following to be named an author:
- Substantial contribution to the conception, design, acquisition, analysis or interpretation of the work
- Drafting the work or revising it critically for important intellectual content
- Final approval of the version to be published
- Agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work
Contributors who meet fewer than all four criteria are acknowledged, not authored — the ICMJE lists funding acquisition, general supervision and language editing as examples of contributions that alone do not justify authorship. The ICMJE’s current Recommendations also require authors to disclose any use of AI-assisted technologies, and state explicitly that a chatbot cannot be listed as an author because it cannot be accountable for the work.
BMJ layers an extra requirement on top of ICMJE: every paper must name one contributor as guarantor, the person who takes full responsibility for the work, had access to the underlying data and controlled the decision to publish. Neither the ICMJE criteria nor the CRediT taxonomy include a guarantor role — it is a BMJ-specific addition that editorial staff must track separately.
Where does a CRediT statement fit in?
A CRediT statement is a contributorship statement written in a controlled vocabulary rather than free text. The Contributor Roles Taxonomy (CRediT) defines 14 fixed roles — Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Funding acquisition, Investigation, Methodology, Project administration, Resources, Software, Supervision, Validation, Visualization, and the two Writing roles — that can be assigned to any named contributor, optionally qualified as lead, equal or supporting.
CASRAI originated the CRediT contributor role taxonomy in a 2014 Nature paper. The standard is now stewarded by NISO as ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022. Because the roles are fixed and machine-readable, CRediT statements can flow through Crossref metadata into ORCID records, unlike a BMJ-style free-text contributorship paragraph.
CRediT does not resolve who counts as an author — a journal using CRediT still applies ICMJE criteria (or its own equivalent) to decide the byline, then uses the 14 roles to describe what each author did. It also has no guarantor field, so a BMJ paper reformatted for a CRediT-only journal loses that designation unless it is preserved separately.
Comparison table: BMJ, ICMJE and CRediT requirements side by side
The table below is designed for editorial staff reconciling a manuscript that must satisfy more than one of these systems at once.
| Requirement | BMJ contributorship | ICMJE authorship | CRediT statement |
|---|---|---|---|
| Core question | Who did what, including non-authors | Who qualifies as an author | Which of 14 fixed roles did each author hold |
| Vocabulary | Free text | Four qualifying criteria, not roles | Controlled taxonomy (14 roles) |
| Guarantor required | Yes — one named contributor | No formal guarantor concept | No guarantor field |
| Covers non-authors | Yes, including patients/public | No — separate acknowledgment section | Occasionally, if the journal allows it |
| Machine-readable | No | No | Yes — flows to Crossref/ORCID |
| Governing source | BMJ editorial policy | ICMJE Recommendations | ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022 |
How should editorial staff reconcile competing submission requirements?
Most friction arises when a manuscript, its co-authors or its data move between journals with different systems — a common case in multi-author biomedical research submitted first to a BMJ title and later revised for a CRediT-only publisher.
- Capture ICMJE authorship qualification first — it is the narrowest gate and determines the byline regardless of which contributorship format the journal uses.
- Map each qualifying author’s ICMJE-based contribution to the nearest CRediT role or roles; several authors can share a role, and one author can hold several.
- Preserve the guarantor designation as a separate field, since it will not survive translation into a CRediT-only statement unless editorial staff carry it across manually.
- Retain non-author contributors (data managers, patient contributors, medical writers) in an acknowledgment section even where the target journal’s CRediT statement has no slot for them.
- Record any AI-assisted technology use in the acknowledgment or methods section per the ICMJE’s current disclosure requirement, independent of which contributorship format is used.
Treating ICMJE criteria as the authorship gate, CRediT as the role vocabulary, and BMJ’s guarantor rule as an additional named responsibility — rather than trying to force one statement to do all three jobs — is the fastest way to avoid rejected or returned submissions.
Answer-first Q&A
What is a contributorship statement example?
A typical example reads: “A.S.: Conceptualization, Methodology, Writing — original draft; B.D.: Data curation, Formal analysis; C.E.: guarantor, Supervision.” BMJ-style statements use fuller sentences naming who designed the study, collected data, drafted the manuscript and served as guarantor.
How do you write an author contribution statement?
List every named contributor, then state their specific role using either free text or the CRediT taxonomy’s 14 fixed terms. Confirm each listed author independently meets the ICMJE‘s four authorship criteria before drafting, and name one contributor as guarantor if the target journal requires it.
Is contributorship the same as authorship?
No. Authorship is a formal status decided by criteria such as the ICMJE’s four-point test and carries accountability for the work. Contributorship separately records what each person, author or not, actually did — the two statements answer different questions and are usually published side by side.
What this means going forward
As more publishers adopt CRediT alongside their existing editorial policies, the practical burden shifts from writing contributorship statements to reconciling them across formats. Editorial teams that treat ICMJE, BMJ’s guarantor rule and CRediT as three distinct, layerable requirements — rather than one form to fill in — will spend less time returning manuscripts for correction and more time verifying that credit is accurately assigned.
