I’m thrilled to share that CRediTas has passed peer review and been accepted to rOpenSci as well as to CRAN. I am glad to acknowledge the editor Emily Riedered and the two reviewers Marcelo S. Perlin and João Martins. Their comments and support were really insightful.

CRediTas is a tiny package to facilitate the tedious job of creating CRediT authors statements for scientific publications. Normally, the first author of a scientific paper organizes a table in a spreadsheet where all the authors self-state their contributions. Often too, it is the first author’s responsibility to state the contributions of all co-authors. However, at the end, the information has to be translated to the CRediT statement format of “Author 1: roles Authors 2: roles …” which is prone to errors and tedious, especially if there are many co-authors. The CRediTas package aims to make this easier by providing a template to be filled in form of a table (csv) and then converting this table to CRediT statement format.

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. Or as a csv file and being populated in your preferred csv editor.

library(CRediTas)

# Save the template to a csv file
template_create(authors = c("Alexander Humboldt", "Carl Ritter"), file = tempfile())

# Save the template as an R data.frame
cras_table <- template_create(authors = c("Friedrich Ratzel",
 "Pau Vidal de la Blache",
 "Pau Vila",
 "Élisée Reclus"))

The template contributions are empty. So you must provide the information of who did what. You can use the fix() function to open and fill the template directly in R:

fix(cras_table)

Or if you wrote the template to a file, once populated with the contributions, you can read it back to R as follows:

cras_table <- template_read(path_to_your_csv_file)

Once the cras_table is populated, for instance:

Then, a text file can be generated following the CRediT author statement format:

cras_write(cras_table, "textfile.txt", markdown = TRUE, quiet = TRUE)

If you open the text file, you will find this statement, all ready to go!

Friedrich Ratzel: Formal Analysis, Resources, Writing - original draft, Visualization, Funding acquisition Pau Vidal de la Blache: Formal Analysis, Resources, Writing - original draft, Supervision Élisée Reclus: Conceptualization, Methodology, Validation, Visualization, Supervision

You can also print the statement directly in a Rmarkdown file using an inline chunk: `r cras_write(cras_table, markdown = TRUE)`.

More information on the package vignette.

Hopefully, this simplifies your life as it simplified mine and allows you to spend more time on actually writing your articles. Also, to better manage your co-authors contributions. Please report any issues you have!