How to Credit Author Contributions

Our process

SEARCH is dedicated to clearly crediting authors’ contributions in publications and other communications. As of 2022, SEARCH uses a modified version of the CRediT Taxonomy to recognize contributions made by each individual.


Conceptualization - Ideas; formulation or evolution of overarching research goals and aims

Corresponding Author - Fields questions from editors, reviewers, readers

Data Curation - Management activities to annotate (produce metadata), scrub data and maintain research data (including software code, where it is necessary for interpreting the data itself) for initial use and later reuse

Draft Preparation - Creation and/or presentation of the published work, specifically writing the initial draft (including substantive translation)

Formal Analysis - Application of statistical, mathematical, computational, or other formal techniques to analyze or synthesize study data

Integration - Synthesizing published and unpublished data and observations

Investigation - Conducting a research and investigation process, specifically performing the experiments, or data/evidence collection

Literature Review - Locating and summarizing relevant literature

Lived Experience & Observations - Observing and sharing environmental and socio-ecological observations

Methodology - Development or design of methodology; creation of models

Investigation - Conducting a research and investigation process, specifically performing the experiments, or data/evidence collection

Photography - Provided photographic images

Project Administration - Management and coordination responsibility for the research activity planning and execution

Resources - Provision of study materials, reagents, materials, patients, laboratory samples, animals, instrumentation, computing resources, or other analysis tools

Review & Editing - Preparation, creation and/or presentation of the published work by those from the original research group, specifically critical review, commentary or revision – including pre-or post-publication stages

Software - Programming, software development; designing computer programs; implementation of the computer code and supporting algorithms; testing of existing code components

Supervision - Oversight and leadership responsibility for the research activity planning and execution, including mentorship external to the core team

Validation - Verification, whether as a part of the activity or separate, of the overall replication/ reproducibility of results/experiments and other research outputs

Visualization - Preparation, creation and/or presentation of the published work, specifically visualization/ data presentation