Author's Contributions

The introduction of CRediT (Contributor Roles Taxonomy) aimed to acknowledge the specific contributions made by individual authors, mitigate issues related to authorship disputes, and foster collaboration.

This concept originated from a collaborative workshop held in 2012, which was organized by Harvard University and the Wellcome Trust, and involved input from researchers, publishers such as Cell Press from Elsevier, and the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE).

  • The corresponding author is responsible for ensuring that the descriptions are accurate and agreed upon by all authors.
  • The role(s) of all authors should be listed, using the relevant above categories.
  • Authors may have contributed in multiple roles.
  • CRediT in no way changes the journal’s criteria to qualify for authorship.

During the submission process, authors are expected to supply CRediT statements, which will be displayed above the acknowledgments section of the published paper, as illustrated below.

  Term   Definition
  Conceptualization   Ideas; formulation or evolution of overarching research goals and aims
  Methodology   Development or design of methodology; creation of models
  Software   Programming, software development; designing computer programs; implementation of the computer code and supporting algorithms; testing of existing code components
  Validation   Verification, whether as a part of the activity or separate, of the overall replication/ reproducibility of results/experiments and other research outputs
  Formal analysis   Application of statistical, mathematical, computational, or other formal techniques to analyze or synthesize study data
  Investigation   Conducting a research and investigation process, specifically performing the experiments, or data/evidence collection
  Resources   Provision of study materials, reagents, materials, patients, laboratory samples, animals, instrumentation, computing resources, or other analysis tools
  Data Curation   Management activities to annotate (produce metadata), scrub data and maintain research data (including software code, where it is necessary for interpreting the data itself) for initial use and later reuse
  Writing - Original Draft   Preparation, creation, and/or presentation of the published work, specifically writing the initial draft (including substantive translation)
  Writing - Review & Editing   Preparation, creation, and/or presentation of the published work by those from the original research group, specifically critical review, commentary, or revision – including pre-or postpublication stages
  Visualization   Preparation, creation, and/or presentation of the published work, specifically visualization/ data presentation
  Supervision   Oversight and leadership responsibility for the research activity planning and execution, including mentorship external to the core team
  Project administration   Management and coordination responsibility for the research activity planning and execution
  Funding acquisition   Acquisition of the financial support for the project leading to this publication

* Reproduced from Brand et al. (2015), Learned Publishing 28(2), with permission of the authors.

Sample CRediT author statement

Zh. S.: Conceptualization, Methodology, Software. P.S.: Data curation, Writing- Original draft preparation. W.W.: Supervision, Visualization, Investigation. A.K.: Software, Validation.: S. Q.: Writing- Reviewing and Editing,

Read more about CRediT here