Contributor Roles Taxonomy
ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022, CRediT
For researchers
When doing research, and especially as part of a team, best practice is always to ensure that there is clarity of roles at the beginning and throughout a research project. This will help to speed things up and avoid confusion and potential disputes at the time of reporting and writing work up, and when individuals may need to describe their contributions according to the CRediT taxonomy.
Many publishers now request contribution information using CRediT. When you are getting ready to submit an article to a journal or publisher that uses CRediT, make sure that you have discussed and agreed with your co-authors and contributors the roles that individuals have played.
Remember:
- Agree and assign roles in advance – when submitting work for publication to a journal that requires CRediT, the submitting and/or corresponding author/s will typically be required to assign CRediT roles across the author and contributor list. Where a publisher or journal does not require CRediT, you can choose to provide contributor information using CRediT in an ‘Author note’, ‘Contribution statement’ or ‘Acknowledgement’ section;
- Individuals can have several roles – it is common that researchers will have made several contributions to a research output (e.g. article) and can therefore be assigned to more than one CRediT role;
- The same role can be assigned to multiple individuals – a specific CRediT role can also be assigned to multiple individuals;
- Some roles won’t apply – each research output is different; if specific CRediT roles are not relevant to a particular output, they do not need to be included.
CRediT’s 14 Contributor Roles
| Conceptualization |
| Ideas; formulation or evolution of overarching research goals and aims. |
| Data Curation |
| Management activities to annotate (produce metadata), scrub data and maintain research data (including software code, where it is necessary for interpreting the data itself) for initial use and later re-use. |
| Formal Analysis |
| Application of statistical, mathematical, computational, or other formal techniques to analyse or synthesize study data. |
| Funding Acquisition |
| Acquisition of the financial support for the project leading to this publication. |
| Investigation |
| Conducting a research and investigation process, specifically performing the experiments, or data/evidence collection. |
| Methodology |
| Development or design of methodology; creation of models. |
| Project Administration |
| Management and coordination responsibility for the research activity planning and execution. |
| Resources |
| Provision of study materials, reagents, materials, patients, laboratory samples, animals, instrumentation, computing resources, or other analysis tools. |
| Software |
| Programming, software development; designing computer programs; implementation of the computer code and supporting algorithms; testing of existing code components. |
| Supervision |
| Oversight and leadership responsibility for the research activity planning and execution, including mentorship external to the core team. |
| Validation |
| Verification, whether as a part of the activity or separate, of the overall replication/reproducibility of results/experiments and other research outputs. |
| Visualization |
| Preparation, creation and/or presentation of the published work, specifically visualization/data presentation. |
| Writing – Original Draft Preparation |
| Preparation, creation and/or presentation of the published work, specifically writing the initial draft (including substantive translation). |
| Writing – Review & Editing |
| Preparation, creation and/or presentation of the published work by those from the original research group, specifically critical review, commentary or revision – including pre- or post-publication stages. |
In 2022 CRediT was approved as an ANSI/NISO standard; CRediT is licensed for permissive re-use (Creative Commons 4.0 (CC-BY)). CRediT descriptors are now available in a range of languages, see CRediT language translations.
