Journal submission systems increasingly reject manuscripts that arrive without a properly structured author contribution statement, and editorial offices report that vague statements — “all authors contributed equally,” with no further detail — are now routinely sent back for revision. For research administrators fielding last-minute questions from principal investigators the night before a submission deadline, having a ready-made author contribution statement template that maps each co-author to a defined role saves time and prevents authorship disputes later in the process.
This article sets out a practical, copy-paste template built around the CRediT contributor role taxonomy, walks through worked examples for different paper types, and explains what institutions need to check before a manuscript goes out the door.
What an Author Contribution Statement Actually Requires
An author contribution statement is a structured declaration, published alongside a journal article, that specifies who did what during the research and writing process. It exists to solve a specific problem: traditional author bylines and acknowledgements sections tell readers nothing about the nature or extent of each person’s involvement. A statement that simply lists names in order gives no indication of who designed the study, who ran the statistical analysis, who supervised the project, or who wrote the manuscript.
CASRAI originated the CRediT contributor role taxonomy in 2014. The standard is now stewarded by NISO as ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022. CRediT defines fourteen discrete roles — Conceptualization, Data Curation, Formal Analysis, Funding Acquisition, Investigation, Methodology, Project Administration, Resources, Software, Supervision, Validation, Visualization, Writing – Original Draft, and Writing – Review & Editing — that can be assigned to one or more contributors, with more than one contributor permitted per role and more than one role permitted per contributor.
ICMJE authorship criteria and CRediT are complementary rather than interchangeable. ICMJE sets the threshold for who qualifies as an author at all (substantial contribution, drafting or revising, final approval, and accountability); CRediT then describes what each qualifying author actually did. COPE guidance on authorship disputes increasingly points editors toward requiring both.
Building the Template: A Role-by-Author Matrix
The most reliable format is a simple matrix with author names as rows (or columns) and the fourteen CRediT roles as the other axis. Research offices can maintain this as a shared spreadsheet template that travels with the manuscript from first draft to submission, updated as contributions evolve.
- Author name — full name as it will appear on the byline, ideally cross-checked against the author’s ORCID iD, which many journals and funders (including UKRI) now require at submission.
- Role(s) held — one or more of the fourteen CRediT terms, selected only where the contribution was genuine and substantial.
- Degree of contribution (optional) — some journals allow “lead,” “equal,” or “supporting” qualifiers per role; check the target journal’s author guidelines before adding this layer, since not all publishers support it.
- Corresponding author flag — mark who holds ongoing responsibility for the record post-publication.
A minimal version of the matrix, ready to adapt, looks like this:
- Author A: Conceptualization, Methodology, Writing – Original Draft, Supervision
- Author B: Data Curation, Formal Analysis, Visualization
- Author C: Investigation, Validation, Writing – Review & Editing
- Author D: Funding Acquisition, Project Administration, Resources
This structure is what most major publisher submission portals (Elsevier, Springer Nature, PLOS, Wiley) expect when they prompt for CRediT roles at the metadata stage — the matrix simply needs transcribing into whatever field format the portal provides.
Author Contribution Statement Example and a Contributorship Statement Example
Below is a full author contribution statement example for a typical multi-author empirical paper, written in the prose format many journals still request alongside or instead of a table:
“A.S. and B.T. contributed to Conceptualization and Methodology. B.T. performed the Formal Analysis and Data Curation. C.O. carried out Investigation and Validation. A.S. wrote the original draft; B.T. and C.O. contributed to Writing – Review & Editing. D.M. was responsible for Funding Acquisition, Project Administration, and Supervision. All authors approved the final manuscript.”
For a systematic review or evidence synthesis — a paper type common in research-administration and health-policy fields — a contributorship statement example might instead read:
“E.K. and F.R. conceived the review question and developed the Methodology. G.P. conducted the systematic search and Data Curation. E.K. and G.P. performed Formal Analysis and Validation of extracted data. F.R. supervised the project and acquired funding. All three authors contributed to Writing – Original Draft and Writing – Review & Editing.”
Note what both examples avoid: generic phrases like “helped write the paper” or “assisted with data” that map to no specific CRediT term. Precision here is what distinguishes a compliant statement from one an editor will bounce back.
Common Pitfalls When Drafting a CRediT Author Statement
Research offices reviewing statements before submission should watch for a handful of recurring errors:
- Assigning roles nobody actually performed. A CRediT author statement is a factual record, not a courtesy list. Honorary authorship — adding a senior colleague’s name to roles they did not perform — is precisely the practice ICMJE and COPE guidance are designed to prevent, and it creates institutional liability if challenged during a research-integrity review.
- Confusing acknowledgement-level input with authorship-level contribution. Someone who provided reagents, proofread a draft, or gave informal feedback may belong in an acknowledgements section rather than the CRediT matrix.
- Omitting the statement from preprints. As preprint posting on servers before peer review has become standard practice across most disciplines, contribution statements should be finalised at preprint stage, not left until journal submission, since author order and roles rarely change between the two.
- Leaving ORCID iDs out of the record. Where ORCID identifiers are captured alongside CRediT roles in the submission system, they become part of the machine-readable metadata that DataCite and CrossRef propagate — omitting them means the contribution record cannot be reliably linked back to the individual researcher.
What This Means for Research Administrators
Institutional research offices are well placed to normalise use of a standard author contribution statement template across departments rather than leaving each research group to invent its own format. A shared template reduces the volume of late-stage authorship disputes that land on ARMA, NCURA, and EARMA members’ desks, and it gives institutions a defensible record if a contribution is later questioned during misconduct proceedings. It also supports REF-style research assessment exercises, where evidence of individual contribution to collaborative outputs is increasingly relevant to how research offices document and attribute institutional outputs ahead of the REF 2029 cycle.
Embedding the CRediT matrix into existing manuscript-tracking or grant-reporting systems — rather than treating it as a one-off form completed at submission — means the data is captured once and can be reused for funder reporting, ORCID record updates, and internal recognition processes such as promotion and tenure dossiers.
Conclusion
The direction of travel is toward contribution statements becoming as routine and structured as reference lists. As funders including UKRI continue to formalise expectations around researcher recognition and as more publishers make CRediT fields mandatory rather than optional at submission, institutions that already have a standard template in circulation will adapt with far less friction than those drafting one for the first time under deadline pressure. Building that template now — and keeping it current with the fourteen CRediT terms as stewarded by NISO — is a modest administrative investment against a recurring compliance and integrity risk.
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