Collaboration is incredible beneficial to everyone involved. It invites more ideas, thoughts, perspectives, that deepens understanding and strengthens the output. In academia, this is of utmost importance to truly understand a subject area, ensure that personal biases are addressed, and to develop a strong output.
Collaboration is not only beneficial, it can also be advantageous in the ‘game’ of academia. Oftentimes, the academic world operates in a ‘publish-or-perish’ system, where research acumen may be distilled into a single metric: quantity of publications. A larger quantity of publications may determine program acceptance, academic jobs, scholarships, grants, and fellowships. Collaborating on publications can be used as a method to build ones personal quantity of publications; a way to get ahead in the ‘game’.
Research Tasks
Let’s begin with an important distinction between contributor and author. Not all individuals who provide contributions (i.e., contributors) are authors. Some contributions are not substantive enough to merit authorship.
The co-created Contributor Role Taxonomy (CRediT) “14 contributor roles designed to represent the key types of contributions typically made to research outputs” (National Information Standards Organization (NISO), 2026). This framework aims to offer transparency for individuals’ contributions, promoting research assessment, integrity, and accountability, while offering individuals credit.
CRediT roles and example research tasks that could be attributed to them.
| Roles and their definitions | Example tasks |
| Conceptualization Ideas; formulation or evolution of overarching research goals and aims. | • Identifying issues, questions or problems that warrant research. • Developing research questions and hypotheses. • Developing research frameworks, tools or experimental paradigms. • Refining and adapting 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. | • Conducting tasks like data processing, cleaning, cataloging, annotating, archiving, modeling, and retention. • Integrating and aggregating data in diverse formats and from diverse sources. • Managing and updating data descriptions and metadata, including maintaining version control and associated documentation. • Developing or implementing data preservation strategies to ensure data remains findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable. |
| Formal Analysis Application of statistical, mathematical, computational, or other formal techniques to analyse or synthesize study data. | • Uncovering patterns and identifying relationships between variables and quantitative or qualitative datasets. • Performing statistical tests to compare different groups within a study or evaluate change. • Applying AI and machine learning models to predict outcomes. • Developing computational simulations to model complex systems or phenomena. |
| Funding Acquisition Acquisition of the financial support for the project leading to this publication. | • Identifying suitable funding sources, assessing eligibility and communicating requirements with the team members. • Developing grant proposals and coordinating the submission process. • Developing budgets and allocating funds to match project scope and funder expectations. |
| Investigation Conducting a research and investigation process, specifically performing the experiments, or data/evidence collection. | • Following or modifying methods to collect or generate data through quantitative and/or qualitative research approaches. • Testing research hypotheses and documenting the research process. • Searching and reviewing the literature, samples, data and other evidence. • Reporting findings for further discussion, analysis, and exchange of ideas. |
| Methodology Development or design of methodology; creation of models. | • Developing quantitative and/or qualitative methodologies and frameworks. • Defining search strategies and determining criteria for systematic literature reviews. • Determining study design such as participant selection, materials, settings, data characteristics, data collection, measurement, and analysis techniques. |
| Project Administration Management and coordination responsibility for the research activity planning and execution. | • Monitoring and reporting progress, timelines, budgets, and compliance with ethical, governance, legal, health, safety, and other relevant standards. • Recruiting participants needed for the research method (e.g. for interviews, focus groups, surveys, fieldwork, clinical trials). • Organizing logistics for expeditions, fieldwork, equipment setup, and space allocation that support research operations. • Managing correspondence with team members, journal editors, and various institutional departments. |
| Resources Provision of study materials, reagents, materials, patients, laboratory samples, animals, instrumentation, computing resources, or other analysis tools. | • Preparing, transporting or managing access to samples, artefacts, tools, equipment, documents, archives, and digital/physical infrastructure. • Inventory management, safekeeping of samples and providing reports on availability and state of resources. • Calibrating and maintaining instruments and equipment. • Coordinating data storage solutions and computational resources. |
| Software Programming, software development; designing computer programs; implementation of the computer code and supporting algorithms; testing of existing code components. | • Designing, developing, testing, debugging, implementing, documenting, sharing and maintaining code. • Developing, maintaining, managing and optimizing digital infrastructure, libraries, and databases. • Conducting data extraction, data mining, and parsing content for qualitative or quantitative data collection and analysis. • Ensuring interoperability, functionality, and scalability of code, databases, systems or platforms across different environments. |
| Supervision Oversight and leadership responsibility for the research activity planning and execution, including mentorship external to the core team. | • Overseeing researchers and other team members by setting milestones, tracking progress, ensuring quality of deliverables, and promoting adherence to ethics and integrity norms. • Teaching, training, moderating and providing personal or professional advice to team members. • Guiding teams in refining methods, interpreting results, and addressing interpersonal challenges. • Collecting, logging, and reporting individual contributions to research. |
| Validation Verification, whether as a part of the activity or separate, of the overall replication/reproducibility of results/experiments and other research outputs. | • Ensuring the integrity, rigor and reliability of data, methods, results and resources through reviewing, verification, benchmarking, factchecking and replicating. • Conducting pilot tests or preliminary studies to validate data collection instruments and protocols. • Appraising studies included in systematic reviews and ensuring compliance with established review standards or reporting frameworks. • Testing computational models or simulations against known outcomes for accuracy. |
| Visualization Preparation, creation and/or presentation of the published work, specifically visualization/data presentation. | • Using data to create charts, graphs or figures. • Creating videos and other interactive media for communicating the findings. |
| Writing – original draft Preparation, creation and/or presentation of the published work, specifically writing the initial draft (including substantive translation). | • Creating the first and full version of an article. • Drafting substantial original text within a section or across sections in an article. |
| 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. | • Reviewing, copy-editing, refining language and providing comments and suggestions. • Revising content based on feedback from internal and external reviewers. • Providing review input of figures, tables, and supplementary materials. |
from Hosseini et al. 2026
While CRediT offers transparency for individual contributions, it does not offer guidance on authorship; “CRediT is NOT intended to define what constitutes authorship” (NISO, 2026).
Authorship
Authorship is determined by more than just participation in the research process. Both CRediT and the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) reference the authorship guidelines established by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (2026):
authorship be based on the following 4 criteria:
- 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.
ICMJE (2026) adds:
“The criteria are not intended for use as a means to disqualify colleagues from authorship who otherwise meet authorship criteria by denying them the opportunity to meet criterion #s 2 or 3. Therefore, all individuals who meet the first criterion should have the opportunity to participate in the review, drafting, and final approval of the manuscript.”
It is important to note if there may be discipline specific authorship guidelines. I have been unable to find guidelines specific to the discipline of Educational Technology but more broadly, in the Social Sciences, the American Sociological Association (2018) offers some ethical guidelines:
- Sociologists take responsibility and credit, including authorship credit, only for work they have actually performed or to which they have contributed.
- Sociologists ensure that principal authorship and other publication credits are based on the relative scientific or professional contributions of the individuals involved, regardless of their status. In claiming or determining the ordering of authorship, sociologists seek to reflect accurately the contributions of main participants in the research and writing process.
- A student is usually listed as principal author on any multiple-authored publication that substantially derives from the student’s dissertation or thesis.
The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) published the COPE Discussion Document: Authorship (2019) is a fantastic resource examining this topic in further detail. It includes definitions, suggestions, disputes and further resources.
Beyond determining who qualifies as an author, the order of authorship carries significant meaning in academic publications. The first author position is typically the individual who made the most substantial contributions to the research and writing process where the last author position is reserved for the senior researcher who provided oversight.
As with all good collaboration, it is important to be transparent and to be in constant communication. Clarifying work, roles, and authorship as early into the process as possible would ensure that everyone understands and is in alignment with the plan. These discussions as well as reaching an agreement can be hard, especially if there’s a power imbalance, and hopefully these frameworks shared in this post prove to be useful.
References
COPE Council. (2019). COPE discussion document: Authorship. Committee on Publication Ethics. https://doi.org/10.24318/cope.2019.3.3
Hosseini, M., Kerridge, S., Allen, L., Kiermer, V., & Holmes, K. (2026). CRediT Roles and Example Research Tasks That Could be Attributed to Them. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18421449
International Committee of Medical Journal Editors. (2026). Defining the role of authors and contributors. https://www.icmje.org/recommendations/browse/roles-and-responsibilities/defining-the-role-of-authors-and-contributors.html#two
National Information Standards Organization. (2026). How to implement CRediT. CRediT. https://credit.niso.org/implementing-credit/
