MDPI requires every submitted manuscript to carry an author contributions statement built on the CRediT taxonomy — a mandatory list of the 14 CRediT roles mapped to author initials, followed by a fixed sign-off sentence. This is stricter than most publishers, many of which still treat CRediT as optional or recommend it only for research articles. Authors who submit across journal families need to know exactly what MDPI checks for, because incomplete or missing statements are a common cause of pre-submission delay.
The Contributor Roles Taxonomy (CRediT) is a fixed, 14-term vocabulary — Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Funding acquisition, Investigation, Methodology, Project administration, Resources, Software, Supervision, Validation, Visualization, Writing – original draft, and Writing – review & editing — used to describe what each named contributor actually did on a research output. CASRAI originated the CRediT contributor role taxonomy in 2014. The standard is now stewarded by NISO as ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022.
- What exactly does MDPI require in the author contributions statement?
- What is the required format and wording?
- Where is CRediT optional rather than mandatory?
- What are the common compliance errors authors make?
- Answer-first Q&A
- What this means for multi-journal authors
What exactly does MDPI require in the author contributions statement?
MDPI’s Research and Publication Ethics policy states that “for complete transparency, all submitted manuscripts should include an author contributorship statement that specifies the contribution of every author.” For research articles with more than one author, this is not a suggestion — it is a submission requirement checked during manuscript preparation, alongside the standard ICMJE authorship criteria (substantial contribution, drafting or critical revision, final approval, and accountability).
The statement must be built from the CRediT role list rather than free text. MDPI’s own instructions for authors reproduce the taxonomy directly and ask authors to attach initials to each role that applies. Review articles are treated slightly differently: because CRediT’s experiment-oriented roles (Investigation, Resources, Validation) often do not map cleanly onto a literature synthesis, MDPI instead asks review authors to clarify who conceived the review, conducted the literature search or analysis, and drafted or revised the text.
What is the required format and wording?
MDPI publishes a template sentence structure: each CRediT role name is followed by a comma and the initials of the contributing author(s), with roles separated by semicolons. A representative example from MDPI’s own manuscript templates reads:
“Conceptualization, X.X. and Y.Y.; methodology, X.X.; software, X.X.; validation, X.X., Y.Y. and Z.Z.; formal analysis, X.X.; investigation, X.X.; resources, X.X.; data curation, X.X.; writing—original draft preparation, X.X.; writing—review and editing, X.X.; visualization, X.X.; supervision, X.X.; project administration, X.X.; funding acquisition, Y.Y.”
The statement must close with a fixed sentence: “All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.” Omitting this closing line, or listing contributions in narrative prose instead of the role-and-initials format, is one of the most frequent reasons a manuscript is returned for correction before it proceeds to peer review.
| Element | Requirement |
|---|---|
| Vocabulary | CRediT’s 14 fixed role terms (no free-text substitutes) |
| Attribution unit | Author initials, not full names |
| Multiple contributors per role | List all initials, separated by commas, “and” before the last |
| Single-author manuscripts | Statement may be omitted; sole authorship implies all roles |
| Closing sentence | Mandatory: “All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.” |
| Review articles | Narrative statement of conception, search/analysis, and drafting responsibility instead of full role list |
Where is CRediT optional rather than mandatory?
MDPI’s blanket, all-journal mandate is not universal practice. Publisher policy on CRediT sits on a spectrum, and authors moving between journal families need to check each venue separately rather than reusing one house style:
- Mandatory, standardised wording — MDPI requires the role-and-initials format described above for every multi-author research article, across all of its journals.
- Mandatory, house-style variation — publishers such as PLOS and Springer Nature journals require an author contributions statement but permit some variation in how roles are phrased alongside CRediT terms.
- Recommended, not enforced — some society and smaller specialist journals encourage CRediT statements per ICMJE guidance but do not reject manuscripts that omit them.
- Journal-editor discretion — a number of journals leave the decision to use CRediT versus a free-text contributions paragraph to the handling editor or field convention.
This inconsistency is the practical reason a compliance walkthrough matters: an author contributions statement that satisfies one journal family may need reformatting — not rewriting, just reformatting into the fixed CRediT syntax — before it satisfies MDPI.
What are the common compliance errors authors make?
Four errors recur across MDPI submission checks, based on the patterns visible in MDPI’s own instructions, templates, and authorship-change forms:
- Using full names instead of initials. The template format calls for initials only, matched consistently to the author list and the acknowledgements/affiliations sections.
- Dropping the closing sign-off sentence. The “All authors have read and agreed…” line is treated as part of the statement, not a separate formality.
- Inventing role labels. Only the 14 defined CRediT terms are accepted; ad hoc labels like “senior author” or “corresponding” are not CRediT roles and do not belong in this statement.
- Applying the full 14-role template to a review article. Review manuscripts need the narrative conception/search/drafting statement, not the full experimental role list.
Answer-first Q&A
What are author contributions for MDPI?
MDPI defines author contributions as a mandatory statement, built from the CRediT taxonomy, specifying which named author performed which of the 14 defined roles. It sits alongside MDPI’s authorship criteria, which mirror ICMJE‘s four conditions: substantial contribution, drafting or critical revision, final approval, and accountability for the work.
What are examples of author contributions?
Examples include Conceptualization (formulating research goals), Methodology (designing the study), Software (writing code), Formal analysis (running statistical tests), Data curation (managing datasets), and Writing – original draft. MDPI requires initials against each applicable role, not a general description.
What this means for multi-journal authors
Research groups publishing across MDPI, society journals, and mixed-model publishers gain the most by drafting one internal CRediT-mapped contributions record per manuscript at submission time, then reformatting the output to match each target journal’s house style — role-and-initials for MDPI, narrative or hybrid formats elsewhere. Because CRediT is a fixed vocabulary rather than a publisher-owned format, the underlying role assignments do not change between venues; only the presentation does. Consulting the CRediT contributor roles reference before submission, and cross-checking definitions against the research administration dictionary, reduces the back-and-forth that a mismatched contributions statement otherwise creates at the editorial-office stage.
As more funders and institutions request structured contributorship data for assessment exercises, publisher-level enforcement patterns like MDPI’s are likely to become the norm rather than the exception, making early, consistent CRediT-mapping practice a durable habit rather than a one-off compliance task.
