latex-credits: A LaTeX package for generating CRediT (Contributor Role Taxonomy) statements

This is a simple LaTeX package for generating contributor role statements that can be easily included in a paper. The text of the roles follows CRediT.

Installation and Usage

Download credits.sty from this repository (or clone the whole repository) and put it in your project. You may load the package using \usepackage{credits}.

Defining Authors

Use the \credit command to define an author and their contributions to the paper. The \credit command takes two parameters, the first one being the name of the author, the second one being a comma-separated list of up to 14 roles that author a contributor might have. These roles follow the CRediT scheme and are as follows:

1. Conceptualization
2. Data curation
3. Formal analysis
4. Funding acquisition
5. Investigation
6. Methodology
7. Project administration
8. Resources
9. Software
10. Supervision
11. Validation
12. Visualization
13. Writing -- original draft
14. Writing -- review & editing

Suppose your paper has three authors, you can enter roles as follows:

\credit{Alice}{Investigation, Methodology, Data curation, Writing -- original draft}
\credit{Bob}{Visualization,Conceptualization}
\credit{Charlie}{Software,Writing -- review \& editing,Validation}

NOTE: You may enter roles in an arbitrary order. Spelling is case sensitive. Use \ to escape the & character as in Writing -- review \& editing.

To add a statement about these contributions to the text, use the \insertcredits command. The visualisation will be embedded in a tikzpicture environment so it can be added in-place; it does not make use of any floats. This is how the statement will look by default:

There is also the option to generate a text statement about contributors. Just use the \insertcreditsstatement command. Here is how such a statement will be formatted (notice that author names have been slightly changed):

Example

The package is readily usable and permits some customisation (this example can also be found in example.tex):

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{xcolor}

\definecolor{cardinal} {RGB}{196, 30, 58}
\definecolor{lightgrey}{RGB}{150,150,150}

% You can configure the colour of the grid and the respective roles of
% individual authors.
\usepackage[role = cardinal, grid = lightgrey]{credits}

% The CRediT taxonomy
% - Conceptualization
% - Data curation
% - Formal analysis
% - Funding acquisition
% - Investigation
% - Methodology
% - Project administration
% - Resources
% - Software
% - Supervision
% - Validation
% - Visualization
% - Writing -- original draft
% - Writing -- review \& editing


% Enter the roles for each author as a comma-separated list with
% exact spelling. Order can be arbitrary.
\credit{Alice}{Conceptualization, Methodology, Supervision, Project administration, Funding acquisition, Writing -- review \& editing}
\credit{Bob}{Supervision, Conceptualization, Funding acquisition, Methodology, Resources, Writing -- review \& editing}
\credit{Charlie}{Software, conceptualization, Formal analysis, Writing -- original draft, Writing -- review \& editing, Validation, Visualization}
\credit{Doug}{Investigation, Formal analysis, Data curation, Writing -- review \& editing, Supervision}
\credit{Eve}{Data curation, Investigation, Software, Writing -- original draft}
\credit{Frank}{Investigation, Data curation, Software, Formal analysis}
\credit{Grace}{Data curation, Writing -- original draft, Visualization}
\credit{Heidi}{Investigation, Data curation}
\credit{Ivan}{Software, Visualization, Writing -- original draft}
\credit{Judy}{Investigation}
% Note the typo in Charlie's role "conceptualization", which is lowercase
% and thus not accepted, instead showing a warning.

\begin{document}
% Display the credits statement as a table
\insertcredits
\end{document}

This results in the following output:

Partial contribution is also supported, see example_granular.tex:

...
\usepackage[role = cvprblue, grid = lightgrey, skipempty, horizontal]{credits}

% You may enter roles with continous values indicating partial
% contribution. The ordering of the values follows the ordering
% of the original taxonomy, i.e.:
\credit{Doug}  {1,0.5,0,0,0.2,0.8,1,1,1,1,0.1,0,0.9,1}
\credit{Eve}    {0,1,0,1,0,1,0,1,0,1,0,1,0,1}
% Values between 0 and 1 will be scaled to be mixed with the background
% colour (white, unless changed by TikZ). This enables giving *partial*
% credit to authors (for instance, if someone helped out initially with
% data curation, but then later went on to another project).
\credit{Frank}{0,0.5,1,0,0,0,0,0,1,0,0,1,0,0}

By passing the horizontal key when loading the package, you can switch the ordering of rows and columns, essentially transposing the statement.

\usepackage[horizontal]{credits}

Moreover, if some of the roles are empty (i.e., no contributor) and you want to hide them, pass the skipempty key:

\usepackage[skipempty]{credits}

If you want to display two distinct statements in the same document:

... % use \credit to add first block of contributions
\insertcredits % Insert first statement
\resetcredits % Delete contributions
... % use \credit to add second block of contributions
\insertcredits % Insert second statement, this time a granular one

If you are only interested in the textual statement, you can use the separator package option to slightly adjust its formatting.

% Default: separate individual concepts/roles by a semicolon. This seems
% to be the de facto standard endorsed by many publishers.
\usepackage[separator = {;}]{credits}

% This would create a list of contributions. Personally, I do not like
% this format too much.
\usepackage[separator = {\newline}]{credits}

Use \insertcreditsstatement to place your textual statement anywhere. Similar to the visual statement, this environment does not create a new group or float; it can be readily added to any text environment. You can find the full example in example_text.tex.

FAQ

To be more precise, this is a list of anticipated questions. No one actually asked any of these questions.

1. How can I contribute to this project?
   
   Simple: open an issue or clone the repository and send me a pull request. All contributions are welcome!

2. The LaTeX code is horrible!
   
   Technically, this is not a question. Also: yes, agreed. Consider improving it by opening a pull request.

3. Can you support a certain style or certain feature?
   
   Maybe! Open an issue and let me know what you are interested in.

Package Users

• Born et al., Chemical representation learning for toxicity prediction

License

The package is licensed using a BSD 3-Clause license. See the license file for more information.