Among other goals, the CRediT Standing Committee (CSC) was established to improve CRediT’s uptake and to support its implementation and use in practice. To this end, we have created a set of illustrative examples to complement the overarching definition of each CRediT role.
What motivated us to develop these examples was threefold. First, and most practically, the CSC frequently receive questions about whether a specific research-related task falls under a certain CRediT role. Second, a recent systematic review of the literature about Contributor Roles (including CRediT) highlighted that any ambiguity about their definition and what is included is likely to deter uptake. And third, the CSC is aware that further iterations of the overall taxonomy will soon be needed to keep pace with changes in research practices, and to also more appropriately cover disciplinary diversity – however (while we are working on it!) current resource constraints make further revisions of CRediT a challenge at this time. As a pragmatic solution, we agreed that providing illustrative examples would help to answer some of the immediate queries that we get. Meanwhile, we are prioritizing the implementation of the existing version of CRediT into scholarly meta-data schema (e.g. through Crossref) to maximize the use of the information that is already being collected.
The examples were created through an iterative and participatory process, including a two-day online workshop organized by NISO in 2022, where 14 experts moderated breakout sessions about each role. Following the workshop, we drafted the first set of examples and iterated them through multiple rounds of review by the CSC. We hope that the examples will assist understanding and implementation of CRediT, and provide a foundation for future refinement as practices evolve.
More information about how to use and implement CRediT is available here. If you have any questions or feedback about CRediT, reach out to nisohq@niso.org