The purpose of this document is to give all researchers involved in a project the opportunity to describe their contributions to a project. Some contributions to a project are publicly visible and memorable; others are less visible, but equally important. Documenting contributions will make it easier to maintain a high level of transparency about the contributions of all team members, with the goal of helping the researcher team to make sound decisions about authorship when preparing a project for publication.
Here are some guidelines:
- Each researcher should create a new section for themselves and use their name as the section header. In that section, please structure your contributions as a bullet-point list.
- Please be concrete and aim to describe your contributions at a moderate level of abstraction -* neither too granular nor too general.
- Each researcher should mention these contributions only after they have made them, rather than prior to making them (e.g., as a commitment device).
- Each researcher should feel free to update this document throughout the project lifecycle, rather than only at the beginning or end.
- If there is a researcher on the team who is unable to directly edit this Markdown file, please ask this individual to either send their contributions to another member of the team who can OR explicitly approve of a set of contributions prepared by another team member.
- Every researcher should have their contributions explicitly documented here before final authorship decisions are made.
These are some example contributions (by no means meant to be exhaustive).
- Wrote first draft of the study pre-registration
- Coded up first version of the behavioral task
- Contributed to analyses on first and second experiments
- Contributed comments on conference abstract submitted to conference (VSS 2025)
- Created task display and stimulus gallery figure
- Contributed slides to talk given by other member of the team
- Provided funding support
- Project administration
- Involved in initial conceptualization of project
- Contributed comments to draft of manuscript
These example contributions are adapted from CRediT (Contributor Roles Taxonomy). 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" (see website for more details: https://casrai.org/credit/).
- 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 of 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.
- Developed paired building experiment
- Ran paired building experiment
- Analysed data
- Exploratory data analysis; performance; word frequency changes; cluster analyses
- LMERs for performance
- Modeling
- Linked learned libraries with vocabularies in model of convention formation
- Assisted Robert with convention formation model
- Created task figures
- Wrote drafts of paper (Methods, behavioral results, full paper revisions)
- Developed prior elicitation experiment
- Ran prior elicitation experiment
- Conceptualization of research goals and aims
- Design of dyadic task
- Help debug parts of experiment and analysis code
- Implementation computational model with Will
- Supervision and administration of data collection
- Drafted parts of paper (Intro/Discussion/Modeling sections)
- Revised paper
- Modeling
- Developed program synthesis model for the block domain
- Ran model on blocks by sweeping though the cost and trial num space
- Manually identified the libraries learned from the block corpus
- Created figure for learned libraries vs cost & trial num
- Wrote Procedural abstraction as program learning in the Method section
- Revised paper