CRediTas

The goal of CRediTas is to facilitate the tedious job of creating CRediT authors statements for scientific publications.

Installation

You can install the development version of CRediTas from r-universe with:

install.packages("CRediTas", repos = "https://ropensci.r-universe.dev")

Create a template

The workflow is meant to work with three basic functions. First, we create a template table. It can be created as a data.frame and being populated in R.

library(CRediTas)

cras_table <- template_create(authors = c("Friedrich Ratzel", 
                                          "Pau Vidal de la Blache", 
                                          "Élisée Reclus"))
knitr::kable(cras_table)

Authors	Conceptualization	Methodology	Software	Validation	Formal Analysis	Investigation	Resources	Data curation	Writing - original draft	Writing - review & editing	Visualization	Supervision	Project administration	Funding acquisition
Friedrich Ratzel	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0
Pau Vidal de la Blache	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0
Élisée Reclus	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0

As you can see, the table is empty. So you must provide the information of who did what. To do this, you can use the fix function to edit directly in R:


fix(cras_table)

Alternatively, you can write the template as a csv file and then populate it in your preferred csv editor.


template_create(authors = c("Friedrich Ratzel", 
                                          "Pau Vidal de la Blache", 
                                          "Élisée Reclus"),
                            file = path_to_your_csv_file)

Additionally, you can also define the roles to be included in the template. If roles is no specified, the roles recommended by the CRediT system are all included:


cras_got <- template_create(authors = c("Danaerys Targaryen", "Kingslayer", "John Snow"),
                roles = c("Free slaves", "Kill white walkers", "Ride dragons"))

# add contribution roles
cras_got[-2, -1] <- 1

knitr::kable(cras_got)

Authors	Free slaves	Kill white walkers	Ride dragons
Danaerys Targaryen	1	1	1
Kingslayer	0	0	0
John Snow	1	1	1

Read a template

If you wrote the template to a file, then you can read it back to R as follows:


cras_table <- template_read(path_to_your_csv_file)

Generate the CRediT author statement

Once the cras_table is populated, for instance:

Authors	Methodology	Software	Validation	Investigation	Resources	Data curation	Writing - review & editing	Visualization	Supervision	Project administration
Friedrich Ratzel	1	0	0	0	1	1	0	0	1	0
Pau Vidal de la Blache	1	1	1	0	0	0	1	1	0	0
Élisée Reclus	0	1	0	1	1	0	0	1	1	1

A text file can be generated following the CRediT author statement format.


textfile <- tempfile()

cras_write(cras_table, textfile, markdown = TRUE)

If you open the text file, you will find this:

Friedrich Ratzel: Methodology, Resources, Data curation, Supervision Pau Vidal de la Blache: Methodology, Software, Validation, Writing - review & editing, Visualization Élisée Reclus: Software, Investigation, Resources, Visualization, Supervision, Project administration

Moreover, if you are writing your paper in RMarkdown or quarto, you can insert the CRediT author statement directly in the text using an inline chunk `r cras_write(cras_table, markdown = TRUE)`.

Do not drop authors without contributions

In some cases, one or several authors did not contribute to any specific role. The drop arguments determines if they must be removed from the statement. If drop = TRUE (default), the authors are removed. Otherwise, they are kept without contributions as below.


cras_write(cras_got, drop = FALSE, markdown = TRUE)