The modern research landscape does not look like science 300–400 years ago, when scientists like Galileo and Newton worked largely on their own. Today, science is typically a team effort.
When various practices in scientific publishing were established, a solitary researcher would typically both write the report describing the findings and do all the actual research work, so there was no real distinction between author and researcher. Journal policies today reflect that history—the word “authorship” is used to refer to how one gets credit not just for writing about but also for doing research. The authorship criteria that many journals use require that a researcher make contributions to the writing of an article to be listed as an author and thereby to get formal recognition for their contributions.
Projects today frequently depend on the contributions of multiple researchers with distinct skills, such as clinicians, statisticians, database curators, or computational modellers. For some data-intensive projects, many labs are involved, involving dozens of people from around the world. It is not always practical for every researcher involved to make substantial contributions to the writing of the eventual journal article. As a result, the traditional writing criterion for getting full credit risks excluding people, even some whose contribution was critical.
It is important that researchers realize that journals published by APA do not have a writing requirement. As the seventh edition of the APA Publication Manual states, “Authorship encompasses … not only persons who do the writing but also those who have made substantial scientific contributions to a study” (American Psychological Association, 2020, p. 24). This policy allows recognition of all those who made major contributions. There remains one major problem, however, one that can mean that some researchers still will not get the credit they deserve.
The authors on papers in APA and other publishers’ journals traditionally were listed with no explicit information about who did what. Some information might be inferred from the order of the names but without any certainty. In such conditions, many readers may give the lion’s share of credit to the more well-known of the authors. Unfortunately, this can disproportionately impact early-career researchers and members of underrepresented groups.
To facilitate credit going to where it is due, several years ago many journals began to require that teams give some indication of who did what in a brief Author Note or Author Information section. In principle this solved the problem, but there was no standardization of this across journals, making it difficult to aggregate across papers the type of contributions that a researcher makes, or for the information to be indexed in databases. In 2013, a list of 14 contribution types was developed, named the Contributor Roles Taxonomy (CRediT), and later standardized as metadata that publishers could attach to journal articles. A mention of CRediT was added to the seventh edition of the Publication Manual and in 2020 APA became one of the publishers providing journal editors with the ability to use CRediT in their journals.
The 14 contribution types of the CRediT taxonomy include “Conceptualization,” “Formal analysis,” “Software,” “Investigation,” “Writing—original draft,” and “ Writing—review & editing.” These are useful for many types of psychological research, but they are not optimal for all types of research; they were devised with biomedical research in mind. Still, the information they carry about the contributions made to papers can help researchers highlight their talents on their CVs and should help funders and institutions better track and reward the combinations of contributions that yield good science. For these reasons, the seventh edition of the Publication Manual mentions CRediT, and editors of APA journals are now able to adopt the CRediT taxonomy at APA journals.
Another difficulty with authorship is occasional disagreement and misunderstandings among contributors about who will get authorship and why, especially when contributors do not discuss the nature of their roles before it is time to write the paper. The Publication Manual advises collaborators to discuss "as early as practicable in a research project” (American Psychological Association, 2020, p. 24) the tasks involved, who will do them, and whose planned contributions merit authorship.
To facilitate these discussions, and to assist the reporting of which contributions different researchers made, several colleagues and I have created a tool, named tenzing.
Tenzing is named after the explorer Tenzing Norgay who, together with Edmund Hillary, was the first to scale Mount Everest but may not have received as much credit as he deserved. Use of tenzing starts with an online spreadsheet, where researchers can indicate which of the 14 CRediT contribution types they expect to contribute to, or already have, depending upon when the spreadsheet is circulated among the team. This can help remind researchers of their relative roles during the project and may be refined at the end of the project.
Tenzing also assists the author who submits the manuscript to a journal, by collating all the information needed for submission in one place—not only does the spreadsheet have columns for the authors’ full names and contributions, but it also has columns for their affiliations and supporting grants. The idea is that a lead researcher can circulate the spreadsheet among all collaborators early in the project and thus not have to go back to them for information at the time of journal submission. Tenzing outputs its information in multiple formats. It can create a standard APA byline of authors with footnoted affiliations for a title page. And it can create concise text that lists the CRediT contributions of the authors, which is useful for those journals that have not adopted the CRediT standard but do allow contribution statements in an author information or acknowledgments section.
CRediT is likely to evolve as researchers provide feedback on their experiences with using it, and other ways of indicating contributions may also gain popularity. In any case, I hope that researchers will improve how they indicate who did what in the complex enterprise that we call science.