By Yeo Pin Pin, Head, Research Services
When there are many authors listed on a paper, how do you recognize and credit the authors for their contributions to the paper? There is a taxonomy called CRediT (Contributor Roles Taxonomy) with a controlled vocabulary of the roles that authors play in the paper.
It was drafted in 2012 at a workshop organized by Wellcome Trust and Harvard University together with input gathered from the scientific community. In a pilot carried out by Allen, et al (2014), the feedback was positive and more than 85% found the taxonomy easy to use and that it covered all the roles of contributors to their paper. The roles in CRediT are:
- Conceptualization
- Data Curation
- Formal analysis
- Funding acquisition
- Investigation
- Methodology
- Project administration
- Resources
- Software
- Supervision
- Validation
- Visualization
- Writing – original draft
- Writing – review & edition
CRediT is used by some journals, like PLOS One and Nature. CRediT is also adopted by selected journals from publishers like Cambridge University Press, Elsevier, IGI Global, MDPI, Oxford University Press, SAGE, Springer, Wiley.
Here is an example of a paper in Expert Systems with Application by Prof Tan Ah-Hwee with the CRediT statement at the end of the paper you will see the following,
As you can see above, multiple roles per author is possible and the same role can be assigned to multiple authors. Some implementations of CRediT even allow you to optionally specify degree of contribution as ‘lead’, ‘equal’, or ‘supporting’ (see more)
When the publisher collects the contributor roles differs, but it can be collected upon article submission in the manuscript system.
As summarized by Allen, O’Connell and Kiermer (2019), the key benefits of CRediT included:
- Providing visibility and recognition for researchers working in large teams whose individual contributions are lost in an expansive author list
- Providing visibility for a diverse range of research contributions that are key to research output being published beyond a traditional focus on writing and drafting (e.g. data curation, statistical analysis)
- Supporting research and researcher evaluation by providing a more holistic and nuanced view of the contributions of researchers to research output
Check out the CRediT site for descriptions of the roles.
References
Allen, L., O’Connell, A., & Kiermer, V. (2019). How we can ensure visibility and diversity on research contributions? How the contributor role taxonomy (CRediT) is helping the shift from authorship to contributorship. Learned Publishing 32 (1), 71-74. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.1210
Allen, L., Scott, J., Brand, A., Hlava, M., & Altman, M. (2014). Publishing: Credit where credit is due. Nature 508, 312–313. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/508312a
