Reporting of who did what is important to give researchers the credit they deserve. Standards like CRediT (the Contributor Roles Taxonomy) allow authors’ contributions to a research paper to be published in a machine-readable format. Surfacing researcher contributions is important for assembling future teams, as well as for the assessment of researchers.
tenzing, a free and open-source tool, includes an online spreadsheet to indicate which CRediT categories each research team member is contributing to, as well as their names and affiliations. tenzing also provides a place to record and track contributions from the start of a project. This addresses a common issue: research teams today are often confronted with a requirement to indicate author contributions at the point of manuscript submission, without this information having been elicited earlier in the project, when it is less likely to lead to disagreement among the research team members. After researchers indicate their contributions during a project, when it is time to write a manuscript, tenzing can output the author contribution types in a concise manner suitable for manuscript title pages and author contribution sections.
Holcombe, A. O., Kovacs, M., Aust, F., & Aczel, B. (2020). Documenting contributions to scholarly articles using CRediT and tenzing. PLOS ONE, 15(12), e0244611. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0244611