Transparent Attribution of Contributions to Research: Aligning Guidelines to Real-Life Practices
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Authors’ editor and Editorial consultant, Via Roma 10, 31020 Vidor (TV), Italy
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Translator and Editorial consultant, C./Compositor Ruiz Aznar 12 2-A, 18008 Granada, Spain
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Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Publications 2019, 7(2), 24; https://doi.org/10.3390/publications7020024
Received: 8 February 2019
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Revised: 27 March 2019
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Accepted: 29 March 2019
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Published: 3 April 2019
(This article belongs to the Special Issue New Frontiers for Openness in Scholarly Publishing)
Research studies, especially in the sciences, may benefit from substantial non-author support without which they could not be completed or published. The term “contributorship” was coined in 1997 to recognize all contributions to a research study, but its implementation (mostly in biomedical reports) has been limited to the inclusion of an “Author Contributions” statement that omits other contributions. To standardize the reporting of contributions across disciplines, irrespective of whether a given contribution merits authorship or acknowledgment, the Contributor Roles Taxonomy (CRediT) was launched in 2014. Our assessment, however, shows that in practice, CRediT is a detailed authorship classification that risks denying appropriate credit for persons who contribute as non-authors. To illustrate the shortcomings in CRediT and suggest improvements, in this article we review key concepts of authorship and contributorship and examine the range of non-author contributions that may (or may not) be acknowledged. We then briefly describe different types of editorial support provided by (non-author) translators, authors’ editors and writers, and explain why it is not always acknowledged. Finally, we propose two new CRediT taxa and revisions to three existing taxa regarding both technical and editorial support, as a small but important step to make credit attribution more transparent, accurate and open.
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Keywords:
accountability; acknowledgment; author; authors’ editor; contributor; CRediT; editing; ethics; translation; writing
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MDPI and ACS Style
Matarese, V.; Shashok, K. Transparent Attribution of Contributions to Research: Aligning Guidelines to Real-Life Practices. Publications 2019, 7, 24. https://doi.org/10.3390/publications7020024
AMA Style
Matarese V, Shashok K. Transparent Attribution of Contributions to Research: Aligning Guidelines to Real-Life Practices. Publications. 2019; 7(2):24. https://doi.org/10.3390/publications7020024
Chicago/Turabian StyleMatarese, Valerie, and Karen Shashok. 2019. "Transparent Attribution of Contributions to Research: Aligning Guidelines to Real-Life Practices" Publications 7, no. 2: 24. https://doi.org/10.3390/publications7020024
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