Changing the Record: How Author Contribution Statements Shift from Preprint to Publication

Abstract

Author contribution statements (ACS) are increasingly adopted across disciplines to promote transparency in scholarly publishing, particularly with the growing use of the CRediT taxonomy (National Information Standards Organization, 2022). These statements clarify the specific roles of each author in a research project, offering a more granular view of credit than authorship order alone. However, little is known about the stability or evolution of these statements across the research lifecycle.

While prior research has investigated how manuscripts evolve from preprint to publication (e.g., Klein et al., 2019), the stability of author contribution statements across these stages remains largely unexplored. To address this gap, this poster presents the design of an exploratory meta-research study investigating how contribution statements change between the preprint and peer-reviewed publication stages.

Using a paired sample of articles drawn from preprint repositories and their corresponding journal publications, we will examine the frequency and nature of changes in ACS during editorial and peer review processes. Statements will be automatically extracted using ContriBOT, a tool developed for identifying and parsing contributorship metadata from scientific texts (Nachev & Akram, 2025).

We will analyze differences in the structure and content of ACS, tracking which roles are added, removed, or reformulated in the transition to publication. We anticipate that peer-reviewed versions may prompt the adoption of more structured or CRediT-compliant language, and that certain roles, such as “Funding acquisition,” may be added more frequently at this stage, reflecting evolving credit dynamics.

The poster will outline the study framework, methodological approach, and planned analyses. We will also reflect on the broader implications for transparency, equitable credit attribution, and the integrity of the scholarly record. In a time of increasing scrutiny on scientific rigor, this work aims to better understand how the documentation of contributions evolves across stages of scholarly communication.