contribution - A Tiny Contribution Table Generator Based on ggplot2

The goal of contribution is to generate contribution table for
credit assignment in a project. This is inspired by Nick Steinmetz (see
twitter
https://twitter.com/SteinmetzNeuro/status/1147241138291527681).

Authors contributions sections are new and still don’t appear in major
journals, but can be improved. Rather than text listing each author’s
contributions, the same data can be presented as a table with rows
corresponding to contributions and columns for each author.

Advantages include:

1. Graphics are faster and easier to comprehend. They are also easier
   to locate in the document.

2. This format can be readily augmented with additional information,
   such as distinguishing between ‘major’ and ‘minor’ contributions
   of each type.

3. This format can be read as easily in either direction, answering
   both “Who did X?” and “What did person Y do?” equally.

4. This format lends itself to a nice extension for including your
   author contribution information on your CV: a similar table where
   each column is one of your papers.

A difficulty with this is the diversity of terminology used, which
would be helped by refinement and more widespread adoption of the
CRediT framework (https://casrai.org/credit).

Feature

• Support table type
  • 3-level contribution (i.e. ‘None’, ‘Minor’ and ‘Major’)
  • numeric contribution
• Dataset palette contains 27 color maps

An R Shiny application can be found at
https://shiny.hiplot-academic.com/contribution-table or https://shixiangwang.shinyapps.io/contribution. Corresponding source
code is available at
https://github.com/ShixiangWang/shinyapps/tree/main/contribution-table.

Installation

You can install the released version of contribution from
CRAN with:

install.packages("contribution")

And the development version from GitHub with:

# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("openbiox/contribution")

Basic example

This is a basic example which shows you how to plot a simple
contribution table:

library(contribution)
data("demo")
demo
#> # A tibble: 5 × 4
#>   Class              WWP   NAS   TM   
#>   <chr>              <chr> <chr> <chr>
#> 1 Designed research  <NA>  Major Major
#> 2 Performed research <NA>  Major <NA> 
#> 3 Developed tool     Major Minor <NA> 
#> 4 Analyzed data      Major Minor Minor
#> 5 Wrote the paper    Major Minor Major

The accepted data format is a data.frame whose first column show the
role and the other columns show the people or projects. This format is
easy to create using R or other tools like Excel.

For a 3-level contribution table, only Minor and Major are valid, a
NA value should put in cell for no contribution.

generate(demo)

The white box represents no contribution, the grey box
represents minor contribution, and the black box represents
major contribution.

The table is nice, easy to read. The result is a ggplot object, so you
can modify in your way!

You can also use other colors and scale_fill_* function from
ggplot2 to map colors:

library(ggplot2)
generate(demo, text_angle_x = 20, color_map = scale_fill_brewer(palette ="Oranges"))

When it is not easy to see the meaning of color, you can show the
legend.

generate(demo, text_angle_x = 20, color_map = scale_fill_brewer(palette ="Set1"), show_legend = TRUE)

More usage please see online
documentation.

To do

• Support special symbol for indicating equal work in a project/paper
• Accept author contributions information in machine-readable formats,
  e.g. in RIS and Bibtex citation documents provided on journal
  websites.