For researchers
Discuss and agree with your collaborators and team members what have been your contributions to planned research outputs (according to the CRediT standard). This can be useful throughout the research process and particularly when preparing to publish your work.
Many publishers now request contribution information using CRediT. When you are getting ready to submit an article to a publisher that uses CRediT, discuss and agree with your fellow authors and contributors which CRediT roles you have played.
Remember:
- Agreeing and assigning roles – when submitting work for publication, the corresponding author/s will typically be required to take responsibility for the assignment of CRediT roles across the author and contributor list – so ideally discuss this before producing work that will use CRediT;
- Individuals can have several roles – it is common that researchers will have made several contributions to a research output (e.g. article) and can therefore be assigned to more than one CRediT role;
- The same role can be assigned to multiple individuals – a specific CRediT role can also be assigned to multiple individuals;
- Some roles won’t apply – each research output is different; if specific CRediT roles are not relevant to a particular output, they do not need to be included.
For publishers
CRediT is now an integrated option for journals and publishers using several well known Manuscript Submission Systems. Alternatively, if a journal or publisher does not offer CRediT systematically through its submission system, the recommendation to capture contributions using CRediT can be included in author guidance notes, and captured through the normal author information gathering processes. You can used the CRediT badge to highlight that you have used the taxonomy
CRediT roles are NOT intended to define what constitutes authorship (see: ICMJE guidance on authorship ; COPE guidance on authorship) but instead to describe the specific contributions of authors and other contributors that result in scholarly output. In this way, CRediT can complement and enhance authorship.
In 2022 CRediT was approved as a NISO ANSI standard; CRediT descriptors are now available in a range of languages, see CRediT language translations.
Recommendations for applying CRediT include:
- List all contributions – require that all contributors describe their input using the CRediT roles, including those who meet authorship criteria and those who may be listed in an Acknowledgement section of an article;
- Agreeing and assigning roles – the corresponding author/s should take responsibility for discussing and agreeing the assignment of CRediT roles across the author and contributor list; all contributors should be given the opportunity to review and confirm assigned roles;
- Individuals can have several roles – individuals are likely to have made several contributions to a research output (e.g. article) and can therefore be assigned to more than one CRediT role;
- The same role can be assigned to multiple individuals – a specific CRediT role can be assigned to multiple individuals;
- Some roles won’t apply – each research output is different; if specific CRediT roles are not relevant to a particular output, they do not need to be included;
- Including information about the ‘degree of contribution’ is optional – where multiple individuals serve in the same role, the degree of contribution can optionally be specified as ‘lead’, ‘equal’, or ‘supporting’ [NB: Individual publishers can decide whether they request ‘Degree of contribution’ information; this is not currently part of the CRediT standard];
- Make CRediT machine readable – to maximise the potential use of CRediT, contributions should be marked up as part of the JATS XML, ideally using JATS V1.2 . If you are using JATS V1.1 you can still tag the contributions using CRediT. The JATS4R (JATS for Reuse) NISO Working Group have developed best practice guidelines for the tagging of scholarly content in JATS XML, including JATS XML to support CRediT.
If you have any queries or questions about how to implement CRediT, please reach out to nisohq@niso.org