The following articulates a set of guidelines for determining author order, assigning roles, setting clear expectations, and crediting fairly in a varied collaborative environment. These guidelines were written (a) in consultation with several similar labs, (b) in review of relevant literature^1-4, and (c) in light of existing standards^5-6.

It is important to discuss authorship attribution early and throughout the project.⁵ Each repository will generally contain a CRedIT.md file, capturing a snapshot of that conversation. Though assigned formally, we expect roles to occasionally change and evolve throughout a project’s lifecycle.

We recommend for the contents of the CRedIT.md log to be narrativized concisely inclusion in the “attribution footnote,” at the time of the publication.

First, Second, Middle, Last (FSML) Author Emphasis Model

First, Second, Middle, and Last authors play distinct but dynamic roles as part of a research team. In case of multiples, “bin” to role, but keep it reasonable: One first, second, and last author is always preferable for clarity.

First author/s tend to do the most work as well as being responsible, especially for project conceptualization and methodology.

Second author/s tend to make deep contributions in several specific areas of responsibility.

Middle author/s usually play significant supporting roles.

Last author/s usually involve more senior scholars, who write, supervise, fund, administrate, and place, contributing meaningfully also to selected areas of deep expertise.

Ad-hoc contributions not rising to the level of authorship can be credited in the attribution footnote.

Considerations

• Facilitate clear ownership of specific tasks.
• The lab’s GitHub project template includes a CREDIT file that should be updated regularly.
• Using logged tools such as as GitHub and Google Docs helps keep the contributions transparent. Try to always capture your offline work in the form of memos or logs committed to the project’s GitHub repository.
• Late projects may be reassigned, under consultation between lab faculty advisors.
• An internal review should generally precede journal or conference submission.
• Be open and forthright about your expectations. Do not hesitate to bring up any issues that may arise with the lab’s faculty advisors.

CRedIT

CRediT is a high-level taxonomy, including 14 roles, that can be used to represent the roles typically played by contributors to scientific scholarly output. The roles describe each contributor’s specific contribution to the scholarly output.⁵

The Training Data Lab at Leiden University, Netherlands, provides a concise graphical representation of the labels as follows:

Badge	Role	Definition
	Conceptualization	Ideas, formulation or evolution of overarching research goals and aims.
	Data curation	Produce metadata, scrub data and maintain research data for initial use and later re-use.
	Formal analysis	Application of statistical, mathematical, computational, or other formal techniques to analyze 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 data 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, instrumentation, computing resources, or other analysis tools.
	Software	Programming, software development; designing computer programs; implementation of the computer code and supporting algorithms.
	Supervision	Oversight for the research activity planning and execution, including mentorship external to the core team.
	Validation	Replication of results and other research outputs.
	Visualization	Preparation, creation and/or presentation of the published work, specifically data presentation.
	Writing – original draft	Preparation, creation and/or presentation of the published work, specifically writing the initial draft.
	Writing – review and editing	Critical review, commentary or revision – including pre- or post-publication stages.

Documents Consulted

1. American Historical Association (AHA). “Collaboration in Historical Scholarship.” Accessed May 3, 2025. https://www.historians.org/resource/collaboration/

2. International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE). 2023. “Defining the Role of Authors and Contributors” the Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals. Updated May 2023. https://www.icmje.org/recommendations/.

3. Fine, Mark A., and Lawrence A. Kurdek. “Reflections on Determining Authorship Credit and Authorship Order on Faculty-Student Collaborations.” American Psychologist 48, no. 11 (1993): 1141–47.

4. Frandsen, Tove Faber, and Jeppe Nicolaisen. “What Is in a Name? Credit Assignment Practices in Different Disciplines.” Journal of Informetrics 4, no. 4 (October 1, 2010): 608–17.

5. National Information Standards Organization (NISO). “Implementing CRediT.” Accessed May 3, 2025. https://credit.niso.org/implementing-credit/.

6. Framework for Open and Reproducible Research Training. “First-last-author-emphasis Norm (FLAE).” FORRT Glossary, 3 Nov. 2021, https://forrt.org/glossary/vbeta/first-last-author-emphasis-norm-fla/.