Ever wondered what role each author has played in a multi-authored research article? Have you been involved in the creation of an article and wished that there was more clarity about the role you played? The CRediT (Contributor Roles Taxonomy) is one solution to this. Read more about it and how we are supporting it at Kent.
CRediT is a standardised system for describing author contributions to a research article.
At the University of Kent we’re keen to encourage a people-centric, open research culture. CRediT supports this by allowing everyone’s contributions to be acknowledged.
The University has signed up to the Technician Commitment and CRediT provides a practical means of recognition and visibility for our technicians working in research. The taxonomy may also be particularly relevant for researchers at an early stage in their career.
For these reasons we wish to support and enable CRediT, so we have integrated it into our institutional repository, the Kent Academic Repository.
CRediT (Contributor Roles Taxonomy)
If you submit an article to a publisher who is participating in CRediT you will be asked to describe your individual contributions using the CRediT taxonomy. The CRediT role descriptions will be published next to each author’s name on the published article. More than one role can be allocated to an author. This supplies readers with a more complete understanding of each author’s role in the research.
For example,
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijimpeng.2024.104897
The taxonomy consists of 14 roles: Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal Analysis, Funding acquisition, Investigation, Methodology, Project administration, Resources, Software, Supervision, Validation, Visualization, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing.
See https://credit.niso.org/ for more information.
Aims of CRediT
CRediT
- provides a more open, standardized and transparent approach to authorship
- ensures that all contributors receive appropriate credit for their work across all aspects of research including writing, data curation and statistical analysis
- enables Equality, Diversity and Inclusivity by recognising all contributors regardless of status or any other characteristic
- reduces ambiguity and potential conflicts regarding authorship
Where is it in the published article?
It may be in the author information of the article e.g. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0297157
There may be a CRediT authorship contribution statement e.g. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eneco.2024.107524
It may just be called Author Contributions e.g. https://doi.org/10.3389/fsoc.2023.1270539
How it works at Kent
Not all publishers are using this taxonomy. See this list of adopters of CRediT for the names of publishers who are.
At Kent we are supporting CRediT at this early stage because it furthers Open Research and is part of a research culture that values honesty and respect.
We have adapted KAR to accommodate CReDiT to capture detailed author contributions and facilitates recognition for all involved.
We will only add CRediT information to an entry in KAR
- when it is present in the published article on the publisher page
- when the roles used on the published article are as stated in the CRediT taxonomy
For each article an author information section on the KAR landing page displays CRediT and ORCID information for the Kent author, when this information is present in the KAR record.
See these examples of KAR entries that include CRediT information:
https://kar.kent.ac.uk/104841/
https://kar.kent.ac.uk/105524/
https://kar.kent.ac.uk/103493/
https://kar.kent.ac.uk/104785/
https://kar.kent.ac.uk/105092/
See our CRediT guide for How to add details to a KAR entry