Guide for completing the CRediT Standard
What is the CRediT (Contributor Role Taxonomy)?
The CRediT (Contributor Role Taxonomy) is a taxonomy composed of 14 contributor roles developed to represent the different types of work involved in the production of research outputs, including journal articles. The system provides a structured, consistent, and transparent format for describing how research was produced, going beyond traditional authorship listing models.
Formalised in 2022 as the ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022 standard, CRediT is globally adopted by publishers and institutions to ensure that each participant receives proper recognition for their specific contribution to the project.
Why adopt this system?
The adoption of CRediT replaces bibliographic conventions based solely on author order, which are often considered insufficient to represent the diversity of contributions within multidisciplinary teams. Its main advantages include:
Detailed Recognition: Enables the identification of who was responsible for specific tasks, such as statistical analysis, data curation, or software development.
Reduction of Conflicts: Minimises the potential for authorship disputes by requiring a clear declaration of each collaborator’s activities.
Integrity and Accountability: Helps prevent practices such as “ghost” or “guest” authorship involving individuals who did not effectively contribute to the work.
Visibility for Early Career Researchers: Provides visibility for researchers whose essential contributions may not be evident within a traditional author list.
Discovery of Expertise: Facilitates the identification of peer reviewers and potential collaborators based on their recorded technical competencies.
Definitions of the 14 Contributor Roles
According to the international standard, authors may be assigned one or more of the following roles:
- Conceptualization: Formulation or development of the overarching research goals and aims.
- Data Curation: Management activities to annotate (produce metadata), clean, and maintain research data, including software code required for interpretation and reuse.
- Formal Analysis: Application of statistical, mathematical, computational, or other formal techniques to analyse or synthesise study data.
- Funding Acquisition: Acquisition of financial support for the project leading to the publication.
- Investigation: Conducting the research and investigation process, specifically performing experiments or collecting data and evidence.
- Methodology: Development or design of methodology; creation of models.
- Project Administration: Management and coordination responsibility for planning and executing the research activity.
- Resources: Provision of study materials, reagents, patients, laboratory samples, instrumentation, computational resources, or other analysis tools.
- Software: Programming and software development; computer program design; implementation of code and algorithms; testing of existing code components.
- Supervision: Leadership and oversight of the research planning and execution activities, including mentorship external to the core team.
- Validation: Verification of the reproducibility of results, experiments, and other research outputs.
- Visualization: Preparation, creation, or presentation of the published work, specifically data visualisation and presentation.
- Writing – Original Draft: Preparation, creation, or presentation of the published work, specifically writing the initial draft, including substantive translation.
- Writing – Review & Editing: Critical review, commentary, or revision by members of the original research group before and after publication.
Guidelines for Completion
Multiple Roles: A contributor may perform multiple roles, and a single role may be assigned to multiple contributors.
Degree of Contribution: When multiple individuals share the same role, authors may specify the level of participation as lead, equal, or supporting by sending the information through the OJS platform (Comments to the Editor) for proper inclusion in the PDF.
Authorship Criteria: CRediT defines contributions to the project but does not replace the journal’s authorship criteria. An individual may have assigned roles without necessarily fulfilling the requirements to be listed as a principal author, depending on disciplinary norms.
