Giving CRediT where it’s due

Much research these days is collaborative and is often reliant on the work of a number of individuals, from generating ideas and concepts, to applying for funding, data collection, analysis and curation, and more. When the time comes to publish, it is important that these contributions are recognised. CRediT (Contributor Role Taxonomy) allows researchers to do this and it applies not just to the contributions of academic staff but also those who support research who do not tend to be recognised for their contributions to research.

In this blogpost we’ll look at what CRediT is and how you can use it to ensure your research publications are transparent about individual contributions so that credit is given where it is due.  

What is CRediT?

CRediT is a taxonomy or classification system that “describes the key types of contributions typically made to the production and publication of research output such as research articles” (CRediT website).

It allows anyone who has made a contribution to a piece of research, but who might not have done enough to be listed as an author, to be recognised as a contributor on a publication. There are many non-academic staff like technicians, librarians, research support and IT staff who contribute to research projects; research outputs like datasets, workflows, protocols and software may rely significantly on their contributions. CRediT can be used to clarify these roles in the acknowledgments section of a publication to recognise these contributions.

CRediT also allows for more granularity in the way that author contributions are presented. Using CRediT makes it easier to see the precise role an author has undertaken with respect to a publication so that they are fairly recognised for their efforts. As such, it is “suited to account for both the division of scientific labor and the allocation of individual contributions” (Larivière, Pontille, and Sugimoto, 2021).

Here are two examples of recently authored articles demonstrating the breakdown of author contributions:

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.susmat.2025.e01317

https://doi.org/10.3390/polym17121605

What are the origins of CRediT?

The taxonomy arose from the collaborative efforts of researchers, research institutions, publishers and funders in the life/biomedical sciences in the early 2010s (CRediT website). Its development was a response to the challenges presented by author lists and author name orders on scholarly publications, namely ghost authorship, large numbers of authors on scientific publications, and the visibility (or lack of) of early career researchers (see Brand et al. 2015).

Alongside this, the need to measure impact in research assessment and the importance of publications for career progression made (and continues to make) the practice of recording and verifying information about contributions increasingly salient.

Despite its disciplinary origins, CRediT has gained widespread usage in many subject areas. It was formalised in 2022 by ANSI/NISO which means it has international recognition as an information standard.

CRediT contributor roles

There are 14 ‘contributor roles’ in the taxonomy. These roles reflect the main types of contributions individuals make in the production and publication of research outputs:

Conceptualization

Data curation

Formal analysis

Funding acquisition

Investigation

Methodology

Project administration

Resources

Software

Supervision

Validation

Visualization

Writing – original draft

Writing – review & editing

More details on each of these roles can be found here on the CRediT website.

How does it work?

When you submit an article to a journal, if the publisher has implemented CRediT the corresponding author will have the opportunity to specify contributor roles using the taxonomy. It’s a good idea to discuss and agree with your co-authors and contributors the roles that individuals have played before you submit your work for publication.

Over 40 publishers have adopted CRediT and the number is growing. You can see the list of adopters here. If you are submitting work to any of these publishers you should have the opportunity to use it in your publications.

When using the Credit roles, there are a couple of things to bear in mind:

• You can assign multiple roles to individuals
• More than one person can be assigned the same role
• Not all CRediT roles will apply to a research output, so if they aren’t relevant you don’t need to include them

If a publisher does not require use of CRediT roles, you can still choose to include the roles in an ‘Author note’, ‘Contribution statement’ or ‘Acknowledgements’ section instead.

Get CRediTing!

So that’s a quick introduction to CRediT. It helps to provide clarity and transparency about the work that individuals have contributed to research projects and publications.Being given fair acknowledgment of their contributions is important for researchers and research-enabling staff at all points in their careers. It’s also the fair and right thing to do.

So look out for it when you next publish, and if you have the opportunity to use it, then use it!

Sarah Dar, Scholarly Communications Officer

Further information

https://credit.niso.org/

CRediT website

https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2020/08/12/beyond-publication-increasing-opportunities-for-recognizing-all-research-contributions/

Scholarly Kitchen article on CRediT

https://doi.org/10.1087/20150211

Article by Brand et al. (2025) in Learned Publishing on the reasons for developing the contributor role taxonomy

Photo by A Friend on Unsplash