Chapter 49 Who did what?
More and more journals are asking authors to supply information about who did what. This is an attempt to increase transparency and reduce the incidence of ghost authorship.
There are a lot of politics around authorship. How do you decide whether or not someone did enough to be included on an author line. This is a very important point. All that I will say here is that this should have been decided early on in the study. Everyone should know whether or not they are going to be an author at the time that they participate. No one should ever find out but they were not an author by reading their name in the acknowledgements.
49.1 CRediT where it’s due
After many iterations, there is now a widely recognised list of 14 different ways in which authors can contribute towards a study (Table 49.1). Even when the study is a chapter in your PhD thesis, it’s unlikely that you can put your name next to every role in the CRediT taxonomy. This does give you some realistic perspective about the collaborative nature of science.
| Ways in which authors contribute to studies |
|---|
| Conceptualisation |
| Data curation |
| Formal Analysis |
| Funding acquisition |
| Investigation |
| Methodology |
| Project administration |
| Resources |
| Software |
| Supervision |
| Validation |
| Visualisation |
| Writing – original draft |
| Writing – review and editing |
If you want to know more about each of these roles and how they are defined in the CRediT taxonomy then please visit the site. You can also ‘claim’ these roles under your Rescognito profile, linked to your ORCID account.
Even if the journal that you are submitting to does not use the credit taxonomy. I would suggest that you use this as the basis for your saying who did what in the publication. See a blog article on this here. Otherwise, you could end up with what is known as hyperauthorship, a phenomenon evidenced by massive co-authorship levels (Cronin, 2001).