Click for download the Authorship Statement Form.

In order to provide transparency in contributions to published work and, enable improved systems of attribution, credit, and accountability, the traditional authorship roles are defined by the CRediT (Contributor Roles Taxonomy). There are 14 authorship roles classified by CRediT (Contributor Roles Taxonomy) to describe author contributions to a research article. Journal of Spatial Research uses CRedit taxonomy to give an opportunity to the authors to share an accurate and detailed description of their diverse contributions to the published work.

• The corresponding author is responsible for ensuring that the descriptions are accurate and agreed by all authors
• The role(s) of all authors should be listed, using the relevant categories given below
• An individual contributor may be assigned multiple roles, and a given role may be assigned to multiple contributors.
• CRediT in no way changes the journal’s criteria to qualify for authorship.

Authorship be based on the following 4 criteria (ICMJE):
• 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.

All the authors of a submitted manuscript must have direct scientific and academic contribution to the manuscript. The author(s) of the original research articles is defined as a person who is significantly involved in “conceptualization and design of the study”, “collecting the data”, “analyzing the data”, “writing the manuscript”, “reviewing the manuscript with a critical perspective” and “planning/conducting the study of the manuscript and/or revising it”. All individuals mentioned as authors should meet the criteria above, and any individual who meets the specified criteria can be identified as an author (*).

Funding, data collection or supervision of the research group alone are not sufficient roles to be accepted as an author. All individuals who did not meet the criteria for authorship but contributed to the study should be listed in the “acknowledgments/information” section.

The corresponding author is the one individual who takes primary responsibility for communication with the journal during the manuscript submission, peer-review, and publication process. Corresponding author assumes responsibility for role assignment, and all contributors have to review and confirm assigned roles. The following abbreviations can be used for author contribution rates. For single-authored articles, the contribution should be indicated with M.

M: For Main, means one of the authors have major contribution
E: For Equal, means all authors have equal contribution
S: For Supporting, means one of the authors have major contribution, others support him/her

Authorship statement should be provided during the submission process. These statements will appear at the end of the main text of a published paper, as shown below.

Author Name Surname 1: Methodology (main), Writing – original draft (main), writing-review and editing (equal). Author Name Surname 2: Conceptualization (main); writing – original draft (supporting); formal analysis (main); writing – review and editing (equal). Author Name Surname 3: Visualization (main); writing – review and editing (equal).

You can access the authorship statement form here.

CRediT’s 14 Contributor Roles
*Conceptualization – Ideas; formulation or evolution of overarching research goals and aims.
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 re-use.
Formal analysis – Application of statistical, mathematical, computational, or other formal techniques to analyze or synthesize study data.
Funding acquisition - Acquisition of the financial support for the project leading to this publication.
Investigation – Conducting a research and investigation process, specifically performing the experiments, or data/evidence collection.
*Methodology – Development or design of methodology; creation of models.
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.
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.
*Writing – original draft – Preparation, creation and/or presentation of the published work, specifically writing the initial draft (including substantive translation).
*Writing – 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.

For further information:
Brand, A., Allen, L., Altman, M., Hlava, M. & Scott, J. (2015). Beyond authorship: attribution, contribution, collaboration, and credit. Learned Publishing, 28(2): 151-155. https://doi.org/10.1087/20150211
Niso, Origins of CRediT
Niso, Summary of the CRediT roles
ICMJE, Defining the Role of Authors and Contributors