Benefits
Since 2014, the contributor taxonomy – otherwise known as CRediT (Contributor Roles Taxonomy) has been widely adopted across a range of publishers to improve accessibility and visibility of the range of contribution to published research outputs, bringing a number of important and practical benefits to the research ecosystem more broadly, including:
- Helping to reduce the potential for author disputes.
- Supporting adherence to authorship/contributorship processes and policies.
- Enabling visibility and recognition of the different contributions of researchers, particularly in multi-authored works – across all aspects of the research being reported (including data curation, statistical analysis, etc.)
- Support identification of peer reviewers and specific expertise.
- Support grant making by enabling funders to more easily identify those responsible for specific research products, developments or breakthroughs.
- Improving the ability to track the outputs and contributions of individual research specialists and grant recipients.
- Easy identification of potential collaborators and opportunities for research networking.
- Further developments in data management and nano-publication.
- Inform ‘science of science’ (‘meta-research) to help enhance scientific efficacy and effectiveness.
- Enable new indicators of research value, use and re-use, credit and attribution.
Contributor Roles Defined
Ideas; formulation or evolution of overarching research goals and aims.
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.
Application of statistical, mathematical, computational, or other formal techniques to analyze or synthesize study data.
Acquisition of the financial support for the project leading to this publication.
Conducting a research and investigation process, specifically performing the experiments, or data/evidence collection.
Development or design of methodology; creation of models.
Management and coordination responsibility for the research activity planning and execution.
Provision of study materials, reagents, materials, patients, laboratory samples, animals, instrumentation, computing resources, or other analysis tools.
Programming, software development; designing computer programs; implementation of the computer code and supporting algorithms; testing of existing code components.
Oversight and leadership responsibility for the research activity planning and execution, including mentorship external to the core team.
Verification, whether as a part of the activity or separate, of the overall replication/reproducibility of results/experiments and other research outputs.
Preparation, creation and/or presentation of the published work, specifically visualization/data presentation.
original draft – Preparation, creation and/or presentation of the published work, specifically writing the initial draft (including substantive translation).
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.
Implementing CRediT
You can use the "person details" section on the "Bibliographic description" page in KAR to now define contributor roles for your upload.
Where multiple individuals serve in the same role, the degree of contribution can optionally be specified as ‘lead’, ‘equal’, or ‘supporting’;