Authorship is a critical component of any academic paper and is especially important in the sciences, where it can affect career advancement, grant funding, and professional reputation.  

Manuscripts submitted to Cell Press must include an author list, and all authors should agree to the content and order of the list. But agreeing on the order and knowing whether someone should be a listed author or only an acknowledged contributor can be tricky, and disputes do sometimes arise.

What does authorship mean at Cell Press?
Although policies on authorship can vary from editor to editor and across journals, Cell Press encourages the use of the CRediT taxonomy of contributor roles to help define who should be an author. CRediT was developed in 2012 during a collaboration between the Wellcome Trust and Harvard University and describes the most common types of contributions to scholarly work in the biomedical field and in science more broadly. Since then, it has been adopted by a number of well-known publishers, including Wiley, Springer, and of course Elsevier and Cell Press.