Contribution Statements as a figure

Academia
1

Hello All,

I have been working on a little hobby project inspired by the following tweet: by Nick Steinmetz (@SteinmetzNeuro)

I figured it would be interesting to see if this could actually be practical. So I decided to put this idea together in a simple web tool.

Giving it a spin

You can try it out at try-CTAB.github.io

of course all the code is open and available on github

Feedback and thoughts appreciated

I would appreciate hearing your thoughts on the current state of the project. This can be very practical in nature (e.g. button X doesn’t work, or some strange behaviour of the pages) but also more fundamental about what a contribution table of this kind should be like.

I have marked some areas that I cannot find a ‘good’ answer to in the draft specification. These areas are labelled with feedback wanted.

Since the project is still a bit rough around the edges, I figured I’d test the waters here. Maybe once it becomes a bit more refined I will also share it on a fully public space like Twitter etc. Feel free to direct message me on twitter(@cursed_tubule), email me, or leave a reply here.

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Hi Nemo,

Sorry for the late response!

I really like Ctab and the interface is quite intuitive with the instructions nicely visualised.

My main feedback would be to ensure that the default table makes use of the CRediT taxonomy (CRediT - Contributor Roles Taxonomy) to ensure interoperability with current systems/practises and make it easy for people to fill in the table (I personally find it easier to delete certain rows if there were no contributions for that aspect, instead of having to manually add rows and having to think about what to name it).

Cheers!

Esther

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Also late to the party, and I agree that the tool is amazing!

The spec is indeed tricky.

  • On the one hand, I see motivation behind using CRediT—it is indeed a recognized standard.
  • On the other hand, CRediT roles are extremely broad, and don’t always make it clear what the authors did.
  • Moreover contributions of different authors, while belonging to the same CRediT category may have completely unrelated specific descriptions.

I’m leaning towards having roles being fixed according to CRediT, and contributions having a detailed description in addition to the none/major/minor characterization. Not sure how these should be rendered though.

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Thanks for your thoughts!

I was not aware of the CRediT standard, I will add that as a template (or make it the default one!).

I think that CRediT indeed might be a bit too broad. I am leaning towards allowing more specific categories than just CRediT as I think CTAB should primarily serve as a quick way of seeing who-did-what, whereas CRediT seems to be more aimed at a meta-publication overview.

Maybe some kind of fallback would make sense, where each contribution e.g. Mass spectroscopy would have to have a CRediT category that it is an extension of (e.g. investigation ). Gonna have to figure out if that makes sense without making things unintuitive…

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