The Contributor Role Taxonomy (CRediT) was developed following the realisation that simple author lists on scholarly research output fail to capture and represent the range of contributions that researchers make to published output.
There are a wide range of use cases for making contributions to research output more transparent and accessible. For researchers it is important to be able to demonstrate the diversity of contributions to research. For research institutions and funders, greater access to information about how and where the researchers they support are making a difference helps to support a more holistic view of research and research evaluation. For publishers, having more information about ‘who did what’ provides accountability and supports research integrity and provenance checking – helping to ensure trust in research.
More broadly, there are many well documented challenges with author lists – and reliance on authors lists as the sole indication of research contributions – including: the trend towards increasing numbers of authors on articles and the concept of ‘hyperauthorship’, in many areas of science and especially in the physical sciences; questionable, guest and ‘ghost’ authorship issues; the importance of making early career researcher contributions visible, and especially where a ‘first author’ paper might prove elusive; the absence of name ordering conventions across research fields.
Most publishers have historically required that authors disclose statements about the contributions of each author upon submission of an article for publication – some using structured lists, but mainly in free-text form and often included in an Acknowledgement section. However, in the absence of standard descriptions and systematic (structured) capture of information, contribution information has been largely inaccessible. At the same time research institutions and funders are keen to find out more about the range of contributions and outputs that researchers make and to support more holistic research and research evaluation practices.
A workshop hosted by the Wellcome Trust and Harvard University in 2012, brought together researchers, research institutions, publishers, and funders to reflect on how to better capture and describe contributions, focusing primarily on scholarly published output (see workshop report). Following the workshop, working initially with a group of biomedical journal editors and members of the ICMJE, a pilot project was established to develop a simple, controlled vocabulary of contributor roles (taxonomy). The aim was to develop a taxonomy that was both practical and easy to implement and use while minimizing the potential for misuse.
CRediT – a simple 14 role taxonomy – was developed and tested (see summary of origins) and has been in widespread use since 2015.
Interest and uptake in CRediT has been greatly accelerated since the award of grant funding for awareness, advocacy, and implementation of CRediT by Wellcome and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation in 2020.