An author contribution statement scientific reports authors submit typically follows the CRediT (Contributor Roles Taxonomy) format, with each author’s role — Conceptualization, Methodology, Writing – original draft, and so on — listed by name. Nature’s flagship title, by contrast, still asks authors for a free-text paragraph describing who did what. Both satisfy the same publisher-wide authorship policy; only the presentation differs.
An author contribution statement is a mandatory section of a peer-reviewed manuscript that discloses which contributor performed which part of the research and writing, either in the authors’ own prose or via a standardised taxonomy of role labels.
- What is an author contribution statement?
- How Scientific Reports applies the CRediT format
- How Nature’s free-text convention differs
- Why one publisher permits two conventions
- Common questions on author contribution statements
What is an author contribution statement?
An author contribution statement records, for every listed author, the specific work they carried out on a study — conceiving the idea, running the analysis, drafting the manuscript, or supervising the project. Nature Portfolio journals require one for every research paper, including review-type articles, under a shared authorship policy that applies across the group’s titles.
That policy sets a minimum bar rather than a fixed format. It defines who qualifies as an author using criteria adapted from McNutt et al. (2018, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1715374115), and it states plainly that “the level of detail varies” between disciplines and manuscripts. Individual journals then decide, within that floor, how the statement should look on the page.
How Scientific Reports applies the CRediT format
In practice, published Scientific Reports articles overwhelmingly present author contributions as a list of named CRediT roles rather than a narrative paragraph. A typical published statement reads along the lines of “J.V.: Conceptualization, Methodology, Software, Validation, Visualization” — role labels drawn directly from the 14-category CRediT contributor role taxonomy. Some published corrections in the journal cite the taxonomy explicitly by its standards home, credit.niso.org.
Scientific Reports’ own written editorial policy does not, however, mandate CRediT by name. It uses the same core requirement as the flagship title — “a statement of responsibility… that specifies the contribution of every author” — and its official worked example is free text: “AB and CD wrote the main manuscript text and EF prepared figures 1–3.” The structured, role-labelled convention that dominates published papers has therefore emerged from submission-system defaults and community norms across Springer Nature’s high-volume titles, not from a policy clause unique to the journal.
- CRediT assigns each author one or more of 14 defined roles, from Conceptualization and Data curation to Writing – review & editing.
- CASRAI originated the CRediT contributor role taxonomy in 2014; the standard is now stewarded by NISO as ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022.
- A structured statement makes individual roles machine-readable, which supports research-integrity checks and contribution-based assessment.
How Nature’s free-text convention differs
Nature’s own house style has favoured a narrative “Author contributions” paragraph since it began publishing them, an editorial policy first announced in the journal’s 3 June 1999 piece, Author contributions, and reinforced across sister titles when several introduced the practice in July 2006. Subsequent editorials — including Nature Photonics’ Contributors, guests, and ghosts (2012) and Nature Materials’ Authorship matters (2008) — defended the free-text paragraph as a way to capture nuance in collaborative, cross-disciplinary teams rather than forcing contributions into fixed categories.
That format persists at Nature today. Authors are still asked to write a short paragraph explaining, in their own words, who conceived the study, generated the data, or drafted the text, rather than selecting from a standardised role list. Some individual papers in Nature-branded research titles have nonetheless adopted CRediT-labelled wording voluntarily, showing that the flagship’s free-text convention is a house-style default rather than an absolute rule.
Why one publisher permits two conventions
Springer Nature’s authorship policy is deliberately format-agnostic: it requires a contribution disclosure for every author but leaves the presentation to each journal’s editorial team. That editorial autonomy is why Scientific Reports, a high-volume multidisciplinary journal, has settled into a structured, role-labelled convention that scales across tens of thousands of submissions a year, while Nature, a lower-volume flagship title with a strong narrative house style, has kept the free-text paragraph it pioneered in 1999.
| Feature | Scientific Reports | Nature (flagship) |
|---|---|---|
| Typical published format | Structured CRediT role list | Free-text narrative paragraph |
| Named taxonomy required by written policy | Not explicitly named | Not applicable (no taxonomy used) |
| Governing policy floor | Nature Portfolio authorship policy | Nature Portfolio authorship policy |
| Standards reference for the taxonomy | ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022 (credit.niso.org) | Not applicable |
| Policy’s own worked example | Free text (“AB and CD wrote…”) | Free text (narrative paragraph) |
Common questions on author contribution statements
What is an author contribution statement example?
A typical example lists each author’s initials against a specific role, such as “J.S.: Conceptualization, Data curation; A.B.: Writing – original draft.” A free-text equivalent describes the same information in prose, for example “J.S. designed the study; A.B. drafted the manuscript.” Both forms are accepted across different journals.
What are the criteria for author contribution?
Under the criteria Nature Portfolio journals apply, adapted from McNutt et al. (2018, PNAS), an author must have made a substantial contribution to the work’s conception, data, or software; have approved the submitted version; and have agreed to be personally accountable for their share of the work, including its accuracy and integrity.
What are author contributions?
Author contributions are the specific, individually attributed tasks each listed researcher performed on a published study, covering activities such as conceptualisation, methodology, formal analysis, investigation, writing, and supervision. They are disclosed either as free text or via the standardised CRediT taxonomy, and appear in the published article.
How do you write an author contribution statement?
Draft it against a fixed checklist of roles — conception, data acquisition, analysis, drafting, revision, and approval — then either list initials next to the matching CRediT role labels or convert the same information into a short narrative paragraph, depending on the target journal’s house style. Confirm the format required before submission rather than after acceptance.
The practical implication for anyone submitting to both journals is straightforward: draft the fullest possible CRediT-labelled breakdown of each author’s role regardless of house style. A structured statement converts cleanly into Nature’s free-text paragraph by simply narrating the same roles, but the reverse conversion — extracting discrete, machine-readable roles from a vague prose paragraph after the fact — is far harder to do accurately. Given Springer Nature’s own ten-year review of CRediT adoption highlights continuing gaps in how consistently contribution data is captured, authors who standardise their internal record-keeping around the 14 CRediT roles from the outset will be better placed whichever journal, and whichever house style, they end up submitting to next.
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