Part of research integrity includes representing contributions to work accurately. That is, one must give credit where credit is due.

Giving credit and acknowledging contributions may not be a straightforward task. Which people should be acknowledged as authors? Is it alright to thank people for their ideas in your work but not add them as authors?

Answers to questions such as the above can be answered using two resources:

• The Contributor Role Taxonomy (CRediT) can help you assign and define roles from the beginning of a project.
• The Defining the Role of Authors and Contributors guidelines by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICJME) provides more information about who should count as an author.

Many publishers now ask authors to use the Contributor Role Taxonomy (CRediT) to identify contributions ethically. CRedIT outlines 14 possible roles - people can have multiple roles - "to describe the key types of contributions typically made to the production and publication of research output such as research articles."

"The Contributor Role Taxonomy (CRediT) was developed following the realisation that simple author lists on scholarly research output fail to capture and represent the range of contributions that researchers make to published output." - origins of CRedIT

Click here to access the taxonomy and understand the 14 possible roles contributors may have.

The ICMJE recommends that authorship be based on the following 4 criteria:

• Substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data for the work; AND
• Drafting the work or reviewing it critically for important intellectual content; AND
• Final approval of the version to be published; AND
• Agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.

Contributors who meet fewer than all 4 of the above criteria for authorship should not be listed as authors, but they should be acknowledged. Examples of activities that alone (without other contributions) do not qualify a contributor for authorship are acquisition of funding; general supervision of a research group or general administrative support; and writing assistance, technical editing, language editing, and proofreading. Those whose contributions do not justify authorship may be acknowledged individually or together as a group under a single heading (e.g. "Clinical Investigators" or "Participating Investigators"), and their contributions should be specified (e.g., "served as scientific advisors," "critically reviewed the study proposal," "collected data," "provided and cared for study patients," "participated in writing or technical editing of the manuscript").