Ten years ago, we and others launched a tool to clarify the role of each author of a research paper. Member Role Taxonomy (CRediT) includes 14 types of contributions, from conceptualization to software and data processing. It was designed to prevent questionable authorship practices and make it easier for researchers to demonstrate the diversity of their contributions to scienceamong other benefits.
Credit where the loan is payable
To summarize, this year we have shown that adoption is steadily increasing (see “More CRediTs Issued”).1. By 2024, CRediT information was included in nearly 850,000 publications (including articles, preprints, and conference proceedings)—about 22% of the 3.7 million publications registered last year in the journal Digital Science. Dimensionsdatabase of scientific publications.
This level of popularity is remarkable given the lack of coordinated efforts or mandates from publishers and sponsors. But the problems that the taxonomy was designed to address are still widely discussed in the research literature. Here we call for CRediT to become the norm to support researchers and research integrity throughout the academic space.
CRediT still needed
Despite the increasing use of CRediT, authorship agreements in scientific publishing remain opaque and confusing, and vary across disciplines. They usually provide little or no information about who contributed what to the study (see “The Roles We Played”). The position of a name on a list of authors is an unreliable indicator of the significance of that person's work or the time spent, especially if the list of authors is long or alphabetical, as is often the case in economics.2 and for large collaborations as well, as is also the case in biomedical research.3.
Stop treating code like an afterthought: write it down, share it, and appreciate it.
Questionable practices such as including honorary authors who are named but did not contribute and excluding “ghost authors” who contributed but are not named also remain widespread—perhaps occurring in about one-fifth of biomedical articles.4.
At the same time, the volume allegations of misconduct And refutations in research is growing rapidly. When results are questioned after publication, transparency about who did what helps investigators, promotes accountability, and can promote a culture of responsible authorship overall.5.
CRediT data can also be used to inform policy interventions that help drive innovation, equity, and impact in science. Data on author contributions were used to examine gender and the division of labor in research.6,7and variations in the distribution of roles across disciplines.8For example.
Source: analysis by L. Allen. etc.
This tool can help institutions and funders identify skills used in cutting-edge areas. Institutions could use the taxonomy to analyze the contributions of their researchers and identify talent to retain and develop. Funders may identify specialists, such as data scientists or software engineers, for targeted funding opportunities or as expert reviewers.
Initiatives such as the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA), launched in 2012, and the Coalition to Advance Research Assessment (CoARA) now advocate the need to consider diverse research contributions when assessing the performance of individuals.9. The value of CRediT is increasingly being recognized by scientific bodies such as the UK Academy of Medical Sciences. In 2022, the taxonomy became recognized standard National Information Standards Organization (NISO) and American National Standards Institute (ANSI), which means that publishers and other stakeholders around the world are encouraged to adopt it.
Obstacles to progress
Despite the need for CRediT, further progress is hampered by the changing research environment, lack of resources, and inconsistent implementation.
The use of CRediT has spread across disciplines and geographic regions.1 – which indicates that it is affecting a string. But some roles may go beyond the original 14 or be better represented by improving the definitions of existing roles, especially in areas such as social sciences and engineering that were underrepresented in the corpus of publications used to develop the taxonomy. For example, community engagement is becoming an increasingly important role as researchers seek to improve relationships with research participants and through citizen science. CRediT's term “software” may need to be expanded to better reflect infrastructure development and data science. And the rise of new technologies such as artificial intelligence may also change the role of scientists in research, from generating hypotheses to reporting results.
