CRediT (Contribution Roles Taxonomy)
Journals mandating CRediT (Contributor Roles Taxonomy) will enable authors to provide information on submission, allowing for detailed information about individual contributions to the work. If not provided on submission, this information can be provided at subsequent revision stages, facilitated by the Editorial Office. The submitting author is responsible for ensuring that contributions of all authors are correct. It is expected that all authors will have reviewed, discussed and agreed to their individual contributions as shared by the submitting author. The authors’ contribution statement will be published with the final article and should accurately reflect contributions to the work.
For consistency, it is important to capture the roles played by a single author on a single-authored paper in the same way as for multi-author papers. This facilitates the readers’ understanding of an author’s expertise and can also be helpful should any questions arise regarding authorship after publication. Please note that a single author does not have to fulfil all the CRediT roles, only those which are relevant.
CRediT Classification:
- 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 reuse.
- Formal Analysis
Application of statistical, mathematical, computational, or other formal techniques to analyze 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
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.
An example of an Authors’ Contribution statement using CRediT with degree of contribution:
Pierro Asara: review and editing (equal). Kerys Jones: Conceptualization (lead); writing – original draft (lead); formal analysis (lead); writing – review and editing (equal). Elisha Roberto: Software (lead); writing – review and editing (equal). Hebei Wang: Methodology (lead); writing – review and editing (equal). Jinnie Wu: Conceptualization (supporting); Writing – original draft (supporting); Writing – review and editing (equal).
For more information, please see the taxonomy website.
