CASRAI Dictionary

Tag: team science

  • Team science and collaborative credit: recognising leadership and coordination

    The image of the lone researcher, or the small group gathered around a bench, no longer captures how much of modern research is done. Many of the most significant advances now come from large, distributed teams, drawing together many disciplines, institutions and countries to tackle problems too big for any single laboratory. This shift towards team science has brought enormous capability, but it has also strained a recognition system built for a smaller scale. When dozens or hundreds of people contribute to a single result, who gets credit becomes genuinely difficult — and the contributions that hold a large collaboration together, such as leadership and coordination, are precisely the ones traditional credit captures least well. This article examines collaborative credit through the mentorship and career-stages domain of the CASRAI Dictionary.

    What team science is

    The challenges of large collaborations have been studied in their own right. The US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine produced an influential report, Enhancing the Effectiveness of Team Science, examining how research teams work, what makes them succeed or fail, and what individuals, institutions and funders can do to support effective collaboration. One of its enduring contributions was to take team science seriously as a phenomenon with its own dynamics — the coordination, communication, leadership and integration that make a large team more than the sum of its members. These are skills and forms of work in their own right, and they are essential to results that no individual could produce alone. Yet because they are not the same as designing an experiment or writing a paper, they often fall through the gaps of conventional credit.

    The credit problem in large teams

    Two related problems emerge as teams grow. The first is hyperauthorship: papers with such long author lists that the byline, by itself, conveys almost nothing about who did what. When a paper has hundreds of authors, being one of them is a weak signal of contribution, and the specific role each person played is lost. The second problem is that some of the most important contributions to a large project are the least legible in traditional terms. Someone who led the collaboration, set its direction and held it together; someone who coordinated the logistics, managed the workflow and kept many moving parts aligned — these people may be indispensable, yet there is no obvious slot for “held the whole thing together” in a system organised around authorship. Leadership and coordination are real work, but they are exactly the kinds of contribution a byline cannot express.

    Contributorship as the answer

    The response that has gained the most traction is the shift from authorship to contributorship: from a list of names to a structured statement of who did what. Instead of asking the unanswerable question of whether someone qualifies as an “author” of a vast collaborative effort, contributorship asks the more tractable question of what each person actually contributed, and records it. This reframing is well suited to team science, because it can capture the full range of roles a large project involves — including the leadership and coordination roles that authorship obscures — and it gives every contributor a specific, visible place in the record rather than anonymity within a crowd. Contributorship does not solve every difficulty of large-team credit, but it changes the question from membership of a category to description of work, which is far more honest about how big collaborations function.

    How CRediT captures leadership and coordination

    The CRediT taxonomy gives contributorship a concrete vocabulary, and two of its roles speak directly to the work of holding a collaboration together. Supervision recognises oversight and leadership responsibility for the research activity, including mentorship of the team and direction of the work — the leadership contribution that is so central to team science and so invisible in a byline. Project administration recognises management and coordination of the research activity’s planning and execution — the coordination work that keeps a complex collaboration aligned and moving. Naming these as distinct, recordable contributions is significant: it asserts that leading and coordinating a project are genuine contributions deserving of credit, not background tasks. The full set of roles is described in our overview of the CRediT roles, and together they let a contributorship statement give each member of a large team a specific account of what they did, leadership and coordination included.

    Recognition across careers

    Capturing these contributions in individual outputs matters, but it also feeds something larger: the recognition of research careers. People who excel at leadership and coordination — who build and run effective teams, who integrate disciplines, who make large collaborations work — are doing work essential to modern research, and a credit system that records these contributions allows that work to count when careers are assessed and rewarded. This is the concern of the mentorship and career-stages domain: ensuring that the full range of ways people contribute to research, across different roles and stages, can be seen and valued. When leadership and coordination are visible in the record, the people who provide them can be recognised for skills that team science cannot do without.

    A consistent vocabulary for collaborative credit

    For collaborative contributions to be recognised consistently — across institutions, publishers and the many systems that record research — the way they are described must mean the same thing everywhere. A leadership or coordination role recorded in one place must be understood the same way in another, or the recognition is lost in translation. That consistency is what the CASRAI Dictionary provides: a shared vocabulary so that the contributions of everyone in a team, from the bench scientist to the person who led the whole endeavour, are understood identically wherever they appear. The connection between authorship and contributorship is explored further in our resources on authorship. Team science has made research more capable than ever; recognising the full range of contributions it depends on, including the labour of leading and coordinating, is how the credit system keeps pace with how research is really done.

  • Co-first authorship and equal contribution: marking shared credit correctly

    Two researchers do roughly equal amounts of the central work on a paper, but only one name can physically come first on the author line. This is now an everyday situation in team science, and the conventional response is to declare the two authors equal contributors. Yet that declaration is recorded in many different ways, some of which barely survive indexing, and the result is that genuinely shared credit is frequently lost when it matters most — in a hiring or promotion committee reading the line. This article sets out how to mark shared credit correctly, building on the conventions described at author order and the role definitions at the CRediT roles.

    What “equal contribution” is claiming

    In most experimental and biomedical fields, position on the author line is information, not decoration. By widespread convention the first author did the bulk of the hands-on work and led the writing; the last author is the senior supervising figure. A co-first or equal-contribution designation is a deliberate intervention against that convention: it asserts that two (occasionally more) people share the leading-author role even though the linear author line can only print them one after another. The claim is specifically about leadership of the work, and it should be reserved for cases where it is genuinely true — not used as a courtesy to soften the awkwardness of ordering.

    It is worth being clear that equal contribution is field-specific. In mathematics, economics, and much of the humanities, authors are listed alphabetically and order carries no contribution signal at all, so an equal-contribution note is redundant. The designation does real work only where order is otherwise read as a ranking.

    The three places shared credit gets recorded

    Shared first authorship can be expressed through three distinct mechanisms, and the strongest practice uses them together rather than relying on any one.

    1. The author-line note

    The familiar device is a symbol against two or more names — commonly a superscript dagger or asterisk — resolving to a footnote that reads “These authors contributed equally to this work.” This is the human-readable signal a reader sees on the page. Its weakness is that it is presentational: the symbol and its note are not reliably captured as structured metadata, so a system harvesting the author list may record the two authors in their printed order and silently drop the equality. That is precisely how co-first status disappears downstream.

    2. The contribution statement, using the degree qualifier

    This is where a contribution taxonomy earns its place. The CRediT taxonomy supports an optional degree-of-contribution qualifier on every role assignment: lead, equal, or supporting. It is not a percentage and it does not weigh one role against another; it simply distinguishes who led a role from who shared or supported it. To record co-first authorship honestly, mark the relevant leading roles — typically Conceptualization, Investigation, Formal analysis, and Writing – original draft — as equal for both authors:

    Author A: Conceptualization (equal), Investigation (equal), Writing – original draft (equal). Author B: Conceptualization (equal), Investigation (equal), Writing – original draft (equal).

    This carries far more information than a footnote. It says which parts of the work were shared, and it does so in a form that can travel into structured systems. The qualifier is widely available in publisher submission systems, though rarely required, so you usually have to choose to use it.

    3. Order-neutral display where the venue allows

    A growing number of venues let authors indicate that the printed order of co-first authors may be swapped on individual CVs — the “authors may list their name first” convention. Where offered, this is a sensible complement to the two mechanisms above, because it acknowledges directly that the linear order does not encode a ranking between the equal contributors.

    A method for marking it correctly

    1. Confirm the claim is true. Equal contribution means the leading work was genuinely shared. If one person clearly led, say so with lead and supporting rather than reaching for equal.
    2. Decide the printed order on a transparent basis. Something has to come first. Agree the basis openly — alphabetical, coin-toss, or rotation across the group’s papers — and record that the order is not a ranking.
    3. Add the author-line note so a human reader sees the equality at a glance.
    4. Encode it in the CRediT statement with the equal qualifier on the shared roles, so the claim survives as structured data rather than as a presentational footnote.
    5. Have every named author confirm their own line before submission. Shared-credit claims are exactly where unconfirmed assumptions cause later disputes.

    Common mistakes

    • Relying on the footnote alone. A dagger and a note are fragile. Without the structured qualifier, the equality often does not survive into the systems that later read the author list.
    • Using “equal” to avoid an honest conversation. Declaring everyone equal because ordering is uncomfortable devalues the designation and misrepresents the work.
    • Confusing equal contribution with author order generally. CRediT records what each person did; it does not set author order, which remains a separate decision governed by your field’s conventions.
    • Forgetting the corresponding-author role. Corresponding authorship is a distinct responsibility and can sit with any author, including one of the co-first authors; settle it explicitly.

    Where shared vocabulary fits

    “Co-first”, “joint first”, “equal contribution”, and “shared senior author” are used loosely and recorded inconsistently across venues, which is exactly why the credit so often fails to travel. A shared, federated vocabulary that defines these designations precisely — and points back to NISO for the CRediT standard and its degree qualifier — is what lets an equal-contribution claim mean the same thing wherever it is read. Supplying that definitional layer is the role the CASRAI dictionary is designed to play; the relevant terms sit in the CRediT extensions domain.

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