attributions

Attributions are the act of assigning something to a cause, author, source, or underlying explanation. They appear in many domains: authorship, licensing, provenance, and analytical reasoning.

In psychology and social science: Attribution theory studies how people explain behavior and events, typically using internal vs external attributions, and stable vs unstable, global vs specific dimensions. It informs understanding of motivation, blame, and self-serving biases.

In art, literature, and academic publishing: Attribution refers to who created or contributed to a work, with formal attribution standards for licenses, citations, and authorship order. Accurate attribution supports intellectual property rights and scholarly credit.

In copyright and licensing: Many licenses require attribution to the author and source, such as Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY). Attribution typically includes the author, title, source, and a link, and may require a notice of changes.

In provenance and archaeology: Attribution concerns the origin or creator of an artifact, tracing its provenance and chain of custody; misattribution can affect valuation and historical interpretation.

In data science and AI: Attribution methods identify which inputs contributed to an output (feature attribution), used for explainability and accountability.

In science and journalism: Proper attribution to sources, data, and prior work is essential for credibility and plagiarism avoidance.