Since 2015, CRediT (Contributor Roles Taxonomy) has been increasingly used by a range of scholarly publishers – and other organisations, providing greater visibility and accessibility to information about the contributions that researchers make to research output.
CRediT can help to 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.