Welcome to MeRIT! Head over to the MeRIT website for more information.
This repository contains the source for that website.
Author contribution statements have improved over the last decade, but they still work at the wrong resolution. A CRediT statement tells you that four authors contributed to "Investigation". It does not tell you who did which part — who ran the field season, who did the assays, who wrote the model.
MeRIT is a simple proposal to fix that: put author initials directly in the Methods section, next to the methods those authors actually performed.
Beetles were reared at 30 °C (EIC) and body mass recorded at eclosion (SN, MJG).
That is the whole idea. It costs nothing, requires no journal infrastructure, and can be adopted by any author team unilaterally. It makes contributions granular — which specific task — and accountable, because the credit sits where a reader can check it against the work. MeRIT complements CRediT rather than replacing it: CRediT gives the high-level taxonomy, MeRIT gives the detail at point of use.
| Page | Contents |
|---|---|
| Benefits | The six benefits of MeRIT, with worked figures |
| Community Examples | Published papers that use MeRIT |
| FAQ | Common questions and objections |
| MeRIT People | People behind and endorsing MeRIT |
| Contribute | How to get involved |
| Cite | How to cite MeRIT |
The site is a Jekyll build using the minima theme,
deployed via GitHub Pages with a custom domain. Navigation order is set by
header_pages in _config.yml.
MeRIT/
├── index.md # landing page
├── Benefits.md
├── Community_Examples.md
├── FAQ.md
├── MeRITPeople.md
├── Contribute.md
├── Cite.md
├── _config.yml # Jekyll config and nav order
├── _layouts/ # home and post layouts
├── _includes/ # head, header, footer partials
├── CNAME # www.merit.help
├── MeritLogo.png
└── merit_fig1.png, merit_fig2.png
Contributions are welcome, and the most useful ones are not code:
- Add your paper. If you have used MeRIT in a publication, add it to
Community_Examples.md. Real examples are the most persuasive argument the site has. - Improve the FAQ. If you hit an objection MeRIT does not yet answer — from a
co-author, an editor, or a reviewer — that question belongs in
FAQ.md. - Fix the site. Typos, broken links, and layout issues via issue or pull request.
See Contribute.md for more. To build locally:
There are several methods by which you can acknowledge the use of the MeRIT system in your paper. For instance, in your Methods, Acknowledgements, or Author Credit sections you could simply write:
"We provide author initials as per the MeRIT system (Nakagawa et al. 2023)."
or
"EIC conducted the fieldwork (note we use the MeRIT system as per Nakagawa et al. 2023)."
Full citation:
Nakagawa, S., Ivimey-Cook, E. R., Grainger, M. J., O'Dea, R. E., Burke, S., Drobniak, S. M., Gould, E., Macartney, E. L., Martinig, A. R., Morrison, K., Paquet, M., Pick, J. L., Pottier, P., Ricolfi, L., Wilkinson, D. P., Willcox, A., Williams, C., Wilson, L. A. B., Windecker, S. M., Yang, Y., & Lagisz, M. (2023). Method Reporting with Initials for Transparency (MeRIT) promotes more granularity and accountability for author contributions. Nature Communications, 14, 1788. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-37039-1
A machine-readable CITATION.cff is included, so GitHub's
"Cite this repository" button gives formatted APA and BibTeX
- TADA — guidelines for improving analytical code sharing
- DCQC — SORTEE data and code quality control checklist
- SORTEE — Society for Open, Reliable, and Transparent Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Website content is licensed under CC BY 4.0.