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Moving beyond the crisis of AI use

The case for an AI contribution statement
By Vanessa Woods, PhD, and Nicole Alea Albada, PhD Date created: September 15, 2026 5 min read 0
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Woods, V., & Alea Albada, N. (2026, September 15). Moving beyond the crisis of AI use: The case for an AI contribution statement. APA Style. https://apastyle.apa.org/blog/ai-contribution-statement

Vanessa Woods, PhD, is an associate teaching professor in psychological and brain sciences at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). She earned a PhD in neuroscience, and has taught and conducted research on inclusive pedagogies in higher education at diverse institutions since 2009. Her research focus is on effective teaching practices and student success in her Active Cultivation of College Equity and Student Success (ACCESS) Lab. The lab projects study (a) creating equity in college classrooms by exploring innovations in pedagogical practices in large introductory STEM courses, (b) raising up transfer student voices and looking at predictors of transfer student success, (c) exploring best practices in faculty undergraduate mentoring contexts, and (d) assessing K-12 science interest and identity to understand the STEM college/career pipeline. Woods is the faculty co-director for the UCSB McNair program, and the faculty director and advisor for the Psychological and Brain Sciences Department Transfer Ambassador Program and the ACCESS Grads program.

Nicole Alea Albada, PhD, is currently an associate teaching professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences (PBS) at UCSB. She received her PhD in developmental psychology, with an emphasis on adult development and aging, and graduate certificates in gerontology and social science methodology from the University of Florida in 2004. After spending 10 years teaching and conducting research in the Caribbean, at the University of the West Indies, Alea Albada began her teaching position at UCSB in 2018. She is the director of the Thinking About Life Experiences Lab, which explores why and how people remember events from their life, and the links between remembering autobiographical events and psychosocial well-being in various age groups and across cultures. She primarily teaches research methods, statistics, and adult development and aging to undergraduate students in the PBS department. She is also deeply invested in training the next generation of instructors by teaching the departmental teaching assistant and graduate instructor training courses, and creating pedagogical materials that are relevant and accessible to colleagues. Alea Albada is the director of education and outreach for the UCSB Center for Aging and Longevity Sciences, spearheading educational initiatives for students to broaden their interest in and understanding of the importance of an aging society, and creating a public-facing lecture series to inform the older adult community of the most up-to-date aging-related research. Alea Albada is also the faculty advisor for the award-winning UCSB chapter of Psi Chi, the International Honors Society in Psychology, and the UCSB chapter of the Brain Exercise Initiative.

Note from the APA Style team: The APA Style team has invited Woods and Alea Albada to write this blog post and the accompanying AI Contribution Statement Guide (PDF, 277KB)opens in new window to contribute to the ongoing discussion about the transparency and legitimacy of AI use in student academic writing. This blog post does not represent a change to APA Style guidelines. An AI contribution statement is not a formal requirement for APA Style papers unless set by the instructor or institution.

AI use and access have become widespread. This has introduced a new technological “other” into writing. Who actually wrote it? How do we cite writing with this other agent available? An AI contribution statement (Alea Albada & Woods, 2025) is a way to lead us out of this “crisis” of authorship that AI invokes.

Psychology as a discipline has the foundation of values and norms to move beyond this crisis. Contributing ideas to others is a cornerstone of psychological writing because ideas are what we value as a field. There is an implicit understanding in the field that ideas are currency: If we use someone else’s ideas in our work, we credit them. This stance is a philosophical and ethical one, and it has led to the current citation practices in our discipline. Appropriately citing where ideas have come from is embedded in our discipline’s norms for citation and referencing practices. The Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (7th ed.) has guidelines on how to appropriately cite and reference others (APA, 2020, Chapters 8–10). APA has risen to this new AI challenge by quickly developing APA Style guidance on how to appropriately cite and reference generative AI tools and by regularly updating these standardized recommendations for the field (McAdoo, 2023; McAdoo et al., 2025a). Academic journals have created policies on whether AI can serve as an author (e.g., APA Journals clearly say, “no”; McAdoo et al., 2025b).

To adapt to this new technological “other,” we argue that the field should move toward requiring an AI contribution statement as part of student writing in psychology. An AI contribution statement is a useful compromise between needing to document an entire chat history (which could be arduous for authors) and not telling anyone you used AI. The statement allows experts to evaluate appropriateness of AI use in the development and scientific communication of the research. Having no documentation for AI use is a dangerous and slippery slope. We developed an AI contribution statement as a way for students to document how they are using generative AI tools (Alea Albada & Woods, 2025).

An AI contribution statement is a structured document that teachers give to students in courses where a research paper (or another writing assignment) is a required course component. The document has student authors provide a written declaration that summarizes the ways in which they used AI in any part of their submitted finished work, from using AI to help them generate ideas to hypothesis development to editing the final paper. This statement provides student authors with a systematic way to keep track of and inform readers of how they used generative AI tools—a way to be transparent with their AI use in the context of their research. The AI contribution statement can also increase students’ metacognitive awareness of how they used AI tools during the project. Details of how to craft and use an AI contribution statement are provided in the AI Contribution Statement Guide (PDF, 277KB)opens in new window.

To be sure, a small percentage of authors will plagiarize, and reference sections do not guarantee authors are being forthcoming and documenting where their ideas originally came from. Similarly, authors could mischaracterize their use of AI in an AI contribution statement. However, reference sections, and AI contribution statements, promote accountability and, more important, they provide a record of the history of the ideas that informed the writing. This history can then be judged by experts as legitimate or not.

Woods and Alea Albada AI contribution statement: No AI tools were used in any way to help us develop this blog post.

References

Alea Albada, N., & Woods, V. E. (2025). Giving credit where credit is due: An artificial intelligence contribution statement for research methods writing assignments. Teaching of Psychology, 52(3), 279–284. https://doi.org/10.1177/00986283241259750

American Psychological Association. (2020). Publication manual of the American Psychological Association (7th ed.). https://doi.org/10.1037/0000165-000

McAdoo T. (2023). How to cite ChatGPT. APA Style. https://apastyle.apa.org /blog/how-to-cite-chatgpt

McAdoo, T., Denneny, S., & Lee, C. (2025a). Citing generative AI in APA Style: Part 1—Reference formats. APA Style. https://apastyle.apa.org/blog/cite-generative-ai-references

McAdoo, T., Denneny, S., & Lee, C. (2025b). Citing generative AI in APA Style: Part 3—Is AI “allowed” in APA Style? APA Style. https://apastyle.apa.org/blog/cite-generative-ai-allowed

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