Nearly every journal now asks for a CRediT authorship contribution statement. The usual way to produce one is a spreadsheet emailed around the co-authors, merged by hand the night before submission. This does the same job in about a minute per person, and writes the statement itself.
Paste the author line
Title, journal, and the authors exactly as they appear on the manuscript. The author line is split for you — commas, and, superscript affiliation numbers and all.
Send one link to everyone
The same address for the whole group. Whoever opens it picks their own name from the author list and ticks their roles, with a one-line explanation beside each one. No registration. Signing in with ORCID is optional; it marks the entry verified and fills in the iD.
Copy the statement
Authors in manuscript order, roles in taxonomy order, official role names. Plus a table, a CSV and a machine-readable version with the CRediT URIs.
An ORCID iD is needed to create a paper, so that the statement has an owner who can be contacted. Confirming your own roles never needs one — your co-authors just open the link you send them.
The fourteen roles
CRediT (NISO Z39.104-2022) fixes the vocabulary so that “did the analysis” means the same thing in every journal. The short glosses below are ours, and they are what your co-authors see beside each checkbox — half the friction of the spreadsheet is that nobody is sure what Resources covers.
| Conceptualization | Had the idea; formulated the research question and the overall aims. |
| Data curation | Produced, cleaned or annotated the data, and kept it usable afterwards. |
| Formal analysis | Applied the statistical, econometric or other formal techniques to the data. |
| Funding acquisition | Obtained the financial support that paid for the work. |
| Investigation | Did the legwork: experiments, fieldwork, interviews, data collection. |
| Methodology | Designed or developed the method, the model or the identification strategy. |
| Project administration | Ran the project: planning, coordination, deadlines, reporting. |
| Resources | Provided materials, samples, instruments, computing or access to a field site. |
| Software | Wrote the code, the scripts or the simulation used in the work. |
| Supervision | Oversaw and directed the work, including mentorship of the team. |
| Validation | Verified that the results and the code actually hold up; replication checks. |
| Visualization | Made the figures, maps and tables, or designed how the results are shown. |
| Writing – original draft | Wrote the first version of the manuscript. |
| Writing – review & editing | Revised the draft: critical review, commentary, rewriting, revisions after referees. |