Beyond authorship: attribution, contribution, collaboration, and credit
Open accessAbstract
Key points: As the number of authors on scientific publications increases, ordered lists of author names are proving inadequate for the purposes of attribution and credit. A multi‐stakeholder group has produced a contributor role taxonomy for use in scientific publications. Identifying specific contributions to published research will lead to appropriate credit, fewer author disputes, and fewer disincentives to collaboration and the sharing of data and code.
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It is unclear whether existing granular attribution frameworks like CRediT will be effective for AI co-creation.
“Although existing, more granular attribution frameworks like CRediT [10] can be applied to works co-created with AI, it is unclear whether they will be effective.”
From Which Contributions Deserve Credit? Perceptions of Attribution in Human-AI Co-Creation (2025) · cites this paper as [10]
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Research works printed but not linked: 11
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- IWCSA Report 2012. Report on the International Workshop on Contributorship and Scholarly Attribution, 16 May 2012. Harvard University and the Wellcome Trust. http://projects.iq.harvard.edu/ attribution_workshop.
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“The CRediT taxonomy [1, 2, 12] for roles in authorship contribution serves the very purpose of finely declaring author involvement in different stages of scientific manuscript production (e.g., A wrote the draft, B supervised the study).”
BackgroundInvestigating the division of scientific labor using the Contributor Roles Taxonomy (CRediT)
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Which Contributions Deserve Credit? Perceptions of Attribution in Human-AI Co-Creation
He, J., Houde, S., & Weisz, J. D. (2025) · Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems · doi:10.1145/3706598.3713522 · Cited by 36 · see citing works
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- Authors
- Brand, A., Allen, L., Altman, M., Hlava, M., & Scott, J.
- Affiliations
- Digital Science (United States) (US)
- Wellcome Trust (GB)
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology (US)
- Access Innovations
- Corresponding author
- Brand, Amy
- Allen, Liz
- Altman, Micah
- Hlava, Marjorie
- Scott, Jo
- Venue
- Learned Publishing
- Publisher
- Wiley
- Published
- 2015-04
- Volume
- 28
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 151-155
- ISSN
- 0953-1513 (ISSN-L)
- 1741-4857
- OpenAlex
- W1997871319
- Cited by
- 678
- References
- 0
- Citations by year
- 2026: 91 · 2025: 109 · 2024: 87 · 2023: 97 · 2022: 106 · 2021: 63 · 2020: 44 · 2019: 23 · 2018: 17 · 2017: 11 · 2016: 26 · 2015: 3 · 2014: 1
- FWCI
- 15.84
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- bronze
- doi.org
- Locations
- Learned Publishing (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Decision Sciences › Statistics, Probability and Uncertainty › scientometrics and bibliometrics research
- Social Sciences › Safety Research › Academic integrity and plagiarism
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › History and Philosophy of Science › Academic Writing and Publishing
- Keywords
- authorship, contributor roles, attribution, author credit, research collaboration, scientific publications, data sharing, code sharing
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