  Contributorship statements have been effective at recording granular author
contributions in research articles and have been broadly used to understand how
labor is divided across research teams. However, one major limitation in
existing empirical studies is that two classification systems have been
adopted, especially from its most important data source, journals published by
the Public Library of Science (PLoS). This research aims to address this
limitation by developing a mapping scheme between the two systems and using it
to understand whether there are differences in the assignment of contribution
by authors under the two systems. We use all research articles published in
PLoS ONE between 2012 to 2020, divided into two five-year publication windows
centered by the shift of the classification systems in 2016. Our results show
that most tasks (except for writing- and resource-related tasks) are used
similarly under the two systems. Moreover, notable differences between how
researchers used the two systems are also examined and discussed. This research
offers an important foundation for empirical research on division of labor in
the future, by enabling a larger dataset that crosses both, and potentially
other, classification systems.
