In copyright law, attribution is the requirement that an author be given credit for their work in any context in which it is used. It is required by most copyright and copyleft licenses, such as GNUFDL and CC-by.

Attribution is often considered the most basic of requirements made by a license, as it allows an author to accumulate a positive reputation that partially repays their work and prevents others from claiming fraudulently to have produced the work.

Typically, the only way a person may copy content without providing proper attribution is to ask for explicit permission. Not even a requirement of attribution may be placed on a work in the public domain, since the creator has given up ownership of the work.

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Attribution (or mental attribution, or attributional bias) is also a psychological concept. It means putting the blame or the glory of a given result, in the absence or better explanations, on somebody who was only partly involved, or not involved at all, something akin to deification or diabolization . Self attribution is, when something turns good, to confer the merits to oneself.

See also attribution theory, fundamental attribution error