Since 2015, CRediT (Contributor Roles Taxonomy) has been used by a range of scholarly publishers – and other organizations, to provide greater visibility and accessibility to information about the contributions that researchers make to research output.
While CRediT is being used by many publishers to provide information about the specific contributions of individuals who qualify as authors on published work, it is not designed to determine authorship. The CRediT roles can also be used to describe the contributions of individuals in contexts not related to article authorship.
CRediT can provide a range of practical and policy benefits to stakeholders in the research system, including:
- Providing visibility of the diverse range of research contributions that researchers make to research output, beyond a traditional focus on writing and being ‘first author’ (e.g. data curation; visualization; methodology development)
- Providing visibility and recognition for researchers working in large teams whose individual contributions can be hidden in an expansive author list
- Supporting research and researcher evaluation by providing a more holistic view of the contributions of researchers to research output
- Improving the ability to track the outputs and contributions of individual research specialists and grant recipients
- Providing a route to enable the identification of potential collaborators, reviewers, experts and specialists
- Supporting research institutions, publishers and authors to avoid and resolve authorship disputes by encouraging more open discussions about the individual contributions to research output
- Providing additional provenance and accountability information around research output to help to assure research integrity
- Providing information to inform ‘science of science’ (meta-research) studies – with the potential to improve and enhance research efficacy and effectiveness
- Enabling new indicators of research value, use and re-use, credit and attribution.