CASRAI Dictionary

Tag: author contributions nature

  • Author Contribution: Scientific Reports v Nature

    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?

    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.

  • Author Contributions at Nature: Beyond CRediT

    Nature’s author contributions statement is a free-text paragraph, not a structured CRediT taxonomy submission. The flagship journal requires authors to describe, in their own words and by initials, what each co-author did — while sister journals such as Nature Communications require formal CRediT role tagging at submission. Authors moving between the two must translate manually.

    An author contributions statement is a short, published section of a paper — required by Nature since 1999 — that names each author’s specific role in the work, distinct from the author list itself.

    What Does Nature’s Author Contributions Statement Require?

    Nature has required a dedicated author contributions statement since 1999, when the journal first asked authors to say “who did what” in a short editorial note. The substance of the policy has barely changed since.

    Nature’s current formatting guide instructs: “Authors are required to include a statement to specify the contributions of each co-author. The statement can be up to several sentences long, describing the tasks of individual authors referred to by their initials.” The journal’s initial-submission guidance gives the template directly: “A.P.M. ‘contributed’ Y and Z; B.T.R. ‘contributed’ Y.”

    This means Nature accepts prose, not categories. There is no dropdown menu, no fixed list of roles, and no requirement to map each contribution onto a named taxonomy. Authors write a short paragraph, using initials rather than full names, describing who conceived the study, ran the experiments, analysed the data, wrote the manuscript, and supervised the work.

    The corresponding author is responsible for confirming that every co-author agrees with the statement before submission — a rule set out in Nature Portfolio’s wider authorship policy, adapted from the McNutt et al. framework published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in February 2018 (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1715374115).

    How Does This Differ From the CRediT Taxonomy?

    The CRediT contributor roles taxonomy — 14 standardised roles from Conceptualization to Funding acquisition — was originated by CASRAI in 2014 and is now stewarded by NISO as ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022. It requires authors to tag each contribution against a fixed, controlled list rather than write free prose.

    Nature’s free-text paragraph and CRediT are not the same instrument, and conflating them causes avoidable submission errors. Nature itself does not ask authors to select CRediT roles; Nature Communications, a separate journal in the same portfolio, does require CRediT role selection at submission.

    Feature Nature (flagship) Nature Communications CRediT-mandating journals generally
    Format Free-text paragraph Structured role selection Structured role selection
    Vocabulary Author’s own words, by initials 14 fixed CRediT roles 14 fixed CRediT roles
    Machine-readable? No Yes Yes
    Governing standard Nature editorial policy ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022 ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022

    A 2023 Nature Communications comment by Nakagawa et al., “Method Reporting with Initials for Transparency” (DOI: 10.1038/s41467-023-37039-1), argued that CRediT’s 14 categories, while useful for crediting intellectual roles, do not clearly capture who is accountable for specific methodological choices, and proposed an initials-based supplement closer to Nature’s original format. The tension between the two systems is therefore live within the Nature Portfolio itself, not only between competing publishers.

    How Do You Translate Between the Two Formats?

    Authors who already hold a CRediT-tagged contributions list — from a prior submission, an institutional record, or a preprint — can convert it into Nature’s free-text format directly. Each CRediT role maps onto a plain-English clause.

    • Conceptualization becomes “conceived the project” or “designed the study”.
    • Investigation / Formal analysis becomes “performed the experiments” or “analysed the data”.
    • Writing – original draft becomes “wrote the manuscript”; Writing – review & editing becomes “all authors commented on the manuscript”.
    • Supervision becomes “supervised the project”; Funding acquisition sits in Nature’s separate funding statement, not the contributions paragraph.
    • Resources, Data curation and Software fold into the relevant experimental or analytical clause rather than standing as separate categories.

    Working in the other direction — turning a Nature-style narrative into CRediT tags for a later submission to a CRediT-mandating journal — takes more judgement, because free text often bundles several CRediT roles into a single clause. Institutions preparing CRediT statements for repository or grant-reporting purposes should capture each author’s roles separately at the point contributions are agreed, rather than reverse-engineering roles from a published paragraph afterwards.

    Neither format determines who qualifies as an author. ICMJE’s authorship criteria — substantial contribution, drafting or critical revision, final approval, and accountability — remain the separate, higher bar that both Nature’s paragraph and CRediT tags sit underneath.

    Common Questions About Author Contributions

    What are examples of author contributions?

    A typical Nature-style example reads: “A.B. and C.D. designed the study; E.F. collected the data; A.B. analysed the results; A.B. and E.F. wrote the manuscript; all authors reviewed and approved the final version.” Each clause names a specific task, not a generic role label, and uses initials rather than full names.

    What is an author contribution in Springer Nature journals?

    Across the wider Springer Nature portfolio, an author contribution statement is a required declaration of responsibility published with the paper. Some portfolio journals, including Nature Communications, mandate formal CRediT role selection at submission; the flagship Nature journal instead accepts a free-text paragraph describing each author’s specific tasks.

    What are author contributions?

    Author contributions are the specific, individually attributable tasks — conception, experiments, analysis, writing, supervision — that each named author performed on a research output. They are distinct from authorship eligibility itself, which under ICMJE criteria also requires drafting or critical revision, final approval, and accountability for the work.

    What This Means for Authors and Institutions

    Research administrators supporting multi-journal submission pipelines should treat Nature’s paragraph and CRediT tagging as two outputs of one underlying contribution record, not two separate exercises repeated from scratch. Capturing contributions in structured CRediT form first — even for a Nature submission that will not display it — makes every subsequent translation faster and reduces disputes at revision stage.

    As more funders and repositories request machine-readable contributor data, the practical advantage sits with structured capture. CRediT, now governed as ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022, is designed for that reuse; Nature’s narrative paragraph is not, and there is no indication the flagship journal plans to change that. Authors and institutions that standardise on CRediT internally, then export a narrative version for Nature submissions, avoid doing the attribution work twice.

  • CRediT Taxonomy Examples: Why Fields Differ

    CRediT taxonomy examples look very different depending on where they are published: a life-sciences paper in MDPI or PLOS typically lists all 14 roles with named contributors, while a humanities article often still carries a single sentence such as “the author confirms sole responsibility for this work.” The gap is not accidental. It traces directly to publisher policy — mandatory in most STEM journals, opt-in or absent across much of the humanities — and it creates a real coordination problem for cross-disciplinary teams trying to standardise credit.

    CRediT (the Contributor Roles Taxonomy) is a 14-role system for describing the specific contributions each author made to a research output, originated by CASRAI in 2014 and now formalised as ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022, stewarded by NISO. This article examines why uptake diverges so sharply by field, with real examples from both ends of the spectrum, and what that divergence means for teams working across disciplinary lines.

    What is the CRediT taxonomy?

    The Contributor Roles Taxonomy (CRediT) is a standardised set of 14 roles — 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 author actually did on a research output.

    CASRAI originated the CRediT contributor role taxonomy in 2014, building on earlier contributorship work from a 2012 workshop convened by Nature, Harvard University, and the Wellcome Trust. The standard is now stewarded by NISO as ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022, published under a CC-BY 4.0 licence. Authors select only the roles relevant to their own contribution — a single author does not need to fulfil all 14.

    Why does CRediT adoption vary so much by field?

    CRediT adoption tracks publisher policy far more closely than it tracks research quality or complexity. In fields where publishers made CRediT statements mandatory at submission — largely biomedical, life-science, and multidisciplinary mega-journals — contribution statements are now routine. In fields where publishers left CRediT as an optional field or omitted it entirely — much of the humanities and parts of the social sciences — author contribution statements remain rare or absent.

    Three structural factors reinforce this split:

    • Authorship norms differ. Life-science papers routinely carry five, ten, or dozens of co-authors performing distinct technical roles, which is exactly what CRediT was built to disaggregate. Humanities scholarship is disproportionately single-authored, where a 14-role statement adds little practical value.
    • Submission-system defaults matter. Where a manuscript system makes the CRediT field required before submission, compliance is near-universal by construction. Where it is optional or absent from the template, uptake depends on individual editors and authors.
    • Funder and integrity pressure is uneven. Biomedical funders and journals face more frequent authorship disputes and integrity investigations, which has pushed publishers such as Elsevier and PLOS toward mandatory disclosure. That pressure is far lighter in most humanities publishing.

    What do CRediT taxonomy examples look like across disciplines?

    The clearest way to see the divide is to compare a typical statement from a mandating STEM publisher with a typical humanities author note.

    A life-sciences example, in the multi-role format required by publishers such as MDPI and PLOS:

    • Author 1: Conceptualization, Methodology, Software, Writing – original draft.
    • Author 2: Data curation, Formal analysis, Visualization.
    • Author 3: Investigation, Resources.
    • Author 4: Supervision, Funding acquisition, Writing – review & editing.

    A journal using the “degree of contribution” variant (as documented in Wiley’s author guidance) adds weighting:

    • Kerys Jones: Conceptualization (lead); writing – original draft (lead); formal analysis (lead); writing – review and editing (equal).
    • Elisha Roberto: Software (lead); writing – review and editing (equal).

    By contrast, a typical humanities article — for example in a history, literature, or philosophy journal that has not adopted CRediT — carries no role breakdown at all, often just: “The author declares sole responsibility for the research and writing of this article,” or, for co-authored humanities work, “Both authors contributed equally to the conception and writing of this paper.” Neither statement maps to any of the 14 CRediT roles.

    The table below sets out where major publishers currently sit on the mandate spectrum.

    Publisher / journal group Primary discipline mix CRediT policy
    PLOS Life and biomedical sciences Mandatory; among the earliest adopters, integrated into submission in 2016
    MDPI Multidisciplinary, life-science-heavy Mandatory across its journal portfolio; structured CRediT statement required at submission
    Elsevier Multidisciplinary CRediT author statement published with the article across participating journals
    Springer Nature (Nature-branded titles) Life and physical sciences Author contributions statement required; CRediT roles encouraged
    Wiley Multidisciplinary Journal-by-journal mandate; degree-of-contribution format offered
    Taylor & Francis Multidisciplinary, incl. humanities and social sciences Rolling adoption; not required across all journals
    Sage Social sciences and humanities-heavy Per-journal; Sage’s own author guidance states “not all of Sage’s journals have adopted CRediT”

    How do publisher policies drive the STEM–humanities divide?

    Publisher policy, not discipline itself, is the direct lever. Elsevier and PLOS built CRediT into the submission workflow as a required field, so authors cannot submit without completing it. MDPI applies the same mandatory approach across its entire portfolio regardless of subject area, which is why even MDPI’s humanities and social-science titles show comparatively higher CRediT completion than peer humanities journals at other presses.

    Sage and Taylor & Francis, whose portfolios include large humanities segments, have taken the opposite approach: CRediT is available but adopted journal-by-journal, and Sage explicitly tells authors to check whether their journal has adopted it before submitting. The resulting patchwork correlates with discipline mainly because humanities-heavy publishers were slower to flip the mandate switch — not because CRediT is technically unsuited to humanities scholarship.

    What does this mean for cross-disciplinary collaboration?

    The uneven mandate creates a practical problem for teams that span disciplines — digital humanities, science communication, bibliometrics, area studies with quantitative components, or any project combining a life-science co-investigator with a humanities co-investigator. One team member’s home journal may require a full CRediT breakdown; the other’s may have no contributorship field at all.

    For research administrators and institutional leaders coordinating such teams, three practical steps reduce friction:

    • Agree contributor roles internally using the CRediT taxonomy at project outset, so the record exists even if the target journal does not require it.
    • Where the venue omits a CRediT field, add a voluntary CRediT-mapped acknowledgement in the author note or supplementary material.
    • Reference the ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022 definitions directly, rather than a publisher’s paraphrase, so contributions remain comparable across journals with different house styles.

    As more funders and institutions use contributorship data for research assessment and expert discovery, the absence of a CRediT statement in humanities-authored work increasingly reads as a data gap rather than a disciplinary choice — one that cross-disciplinary teams have a direct incentive to close voluntarily, even where their venue does not require it.

    Common questions about CRediT taxonomy examples

    What is the CRediT taxonomy?

    CRediT is a standardised, 14-role taxonomy for describing individual author contributions to a research output, covering everything from Conceptualization and Methodology to Writing – Review & Editing. It replaces vague author-order conventions with an explicit, comparable role list.

    What are the 14 roles of the CRediT taxonomy?

    The 14 roles are Conceptualization, Data Curation, Formal Analysis, Funding Acquisition, Investigation, Methodology, Project Administration, Resources, Software, Supervision, Validation, Visualization, Writing – Original Draft, and Writing – Review & Editing. Authors select only the roles that genuinely apply to their contribution.

    What does “Investigation” mean in the CRediT taxonomy?

    Under CRediT, Investigation covers conducting the research process itself — specifically performing experiments or carrying out data and evidence collection. It is distinct from Methodology (designing the approach) and Formal Analysis (analysing the resulting data).

    How do authors give CRediT to a co-author in a contribution statement?

    Authors list each co-author by name followed by their applicable CRediT roles, optionally with a degree of contribution such as “lead,” “equal,” or “supporting.” For example: “Author A: Conceptualization (lead), Writing – original draft (lead).”

    The disciplinary gap in CRediT adoption is a policy artefact, not a verdict on whether contributorship matters outside the life sciences. As cross-disciplinary funding calls, digital-humanities partnerships, and research-assessment exercises increasingly draw on contributorship data, journals that have left CRediT optional will face growing pressure — from funders, from co-authors in mandating fields, and from researchers building a verifiable contribution record — to close the gap rather than leave it to the discipline they happen to publish in.