CRediT

     

CRediT
Dove Medical Press has adopted the CRediT taxonomy and authors are now required to complete the CRediT taxonomy when providing author contributions for all submissions.

What is the CRediT taxonomy?
CRediT is a high-level taxonomy, which includes 14 roles, that can be used to represent the roles typically performed by contributors to scientific scholarly articles. The roles describe each contributor’s specific contribution to the scholarly output.

What are the benefits of using the CRediT taxonomy?
Adoption of the CRediT taxonomy is intended to improve accessibility and visibility of the range of contributions to published research outputs. Some of the benefits include:

  • 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
  • Improving the ability to track the outputs and contributions of individual research specialists and grant recipients
  • Further developments in data management and nano-publication
  • Enable new indicators of research value, use and re-use, credit and attribution

Importantly, the CRediT taxonomy is not intended to determine who qualifies as an author. Each author of an article may have one or more CRediT contribution roles but having a role described by the taxonomy does not automatically qualify someone as an author. Authorship is still determined according to our authorship guidelines which are based on the ICMJE requirements.

The 14 roles included in the CRediT taxonomy are:

  • 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, creation and/or presentation of the published work, specifically writing the initial draft (including substantive translation).
  • Writing – review and 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.

More information about the CRediT taxonomy can be found at https://casrai.org/credit/.


Please note: This page was adapted from the Casrai CRediT homepage and Atkins H. Author Credit: PLOS and CRediT Update. 2016. Assessment, In the News, Publishing, Science communication https://blogs.plos.org/plos/2016/07/author-credit-plos-and-credit-update/.

Updated 28 November 2018