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Overview

All research- and research-enabling staff should receive credit for their contributions to research. Ensuring that all significant contributions to research are recognised and attributed, regardless of whether the contribution is from an academic or non-academic colleague, is a key commitment on both the СŷÊÓƵ’s  and the . It is especially important that all contributions and contributors to research are acknowledged in research publications and outputs, regardless of whether the contributions or contributors meet the criteria for ‘authorship’. 

Many research-enabling staff, including , data stewards, , librarians, Research Software Engineers, and colleagues make key contributions to research, but are not currently recognised as contributors to research in a formal and consistent way. 

The is a 14-role taxonomy which can be used to describe the key types of contributions typically made to the production and publication of research outputs such as research articles. It has been designed in recognition of the limitations of traditional methods of listing authors on research publications. The taxonomy aims to enable the range and nature of contributions to scholarly outputs to be captured in a transparent, consistent, and structured way.

The СŷÊÓƵ encourages the use of the Contributor Role Taxonomy (CRediT) and has started to track both the presence of and diversity of CRediT contributor roles recorded in research publications.

The CRediT Roles

The following roles have been identified as the key types of contributions typically made to the production and publication of research outputs such as research articles:

Conceptualization

Ideas; formulation or evolution of overarching research goals and aims.

Data curation

Management activities to annotate data (produce metadata), clean data, and maintain research data (including software code, where it is necessary for interpreting the data itself) for initial use and later re-use.

Formal analysis

Application of statistical, mathematical, computational, or other formal techniques to analyse or synthesize study data.

Funding acquisition

Acquisition of the financial support for the project leading to this publication.

Investigation

Conducting a research and investigation process, specifically performing the experiments, or data/evidence collection.

Methodology

Development or design of methodology; creation of models.

Project administration

Management and/or coordination of the research activity

Resources

Provision of study materials, reagents, materials, patients, laboratory samples, animals, instrumentation, computing resources, or other analysis tools.

Software

Programming, software development; designing computer programs; implementation of the computer code and supporting algorithms; testing of existing code components.

Supervision

Oversight and leadership responsibility for the research activity planning and execution, including mentorship external to the core team.

Validation

Verification, whether as a part of the activity or separate, of the overall replication/reproducibility of results/experiments and other research outputs.

Visualization

Preparation, creation and/or presentation of the published work, specifically visualization/data presentation.

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 post-publication stages.

Using the Contributor Role Taxonomy

Many journals and manuscript submission systems now request that contribution information, using CRediT, is included in a Contributor/ Contribution Statement. When submitting work for publication to a journal that requires CRediT, the submitting and/or corresponding author/s will typically be required to assign CRediT roles across the author and contributor list. 

CRediT is not intended to define what constitutes authorship, but instead to describe the specific contributions of authors and other contributors that result in a scholarly output; used in this way, CRediT can complement and enhance authorship. 

As set out in the Good Research & Innovation Practices (GRIP) policy, authors should refer to the authorship criteria of the relevant publishing venue. Where no other authorship criteria are specified by the publishing venue, the СŷÊÓƵ of Sheffield uses the of authorship, which requires that an author has made substantial intellectual contributions to the research AND drafted or reviewed the publication AND approved the final version AND has agreed to take public responsibility for the entire output. CRediT enables you to describe and attribute the contributions of those who have made intellectual contributions to the research, but who may not have been involved in writing the research output, and who are not publicly responsible for the entire output.

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.

When you are preparing to submit an article to a journal or publisher that uses CRediT, make sure that you have discussed and agreed with your co-authors and contributors the roles that individuals have played. When doing research, and especially as part of a team, best practice is always to ensure that contributor roles are assigned and agreed at the beginning and revisited throughout a research project. This will avoid confusion and potential disputes at the time of reporting and writing up, and when individuals may wish to describe their contributions according to the CRediT taxonomy when publishing associated outputs such as datasets, workflows and/or protocols, and software.

Where a publisher or journal does not require CRediT, or where a journal specifies that only the authors of the paper be attributed, you can choose to provide contributor information using CRediT in an ‘Author note’, ‘Contribution statement’ or ‘Acknowledgements’ section. You can also .

Examples

Here are some examples of good practice in using CRediT from Sheffield authors:

• Louis Allen, Haiping Lu, and Joan Cordiner (2024). ‘Knowledge-Enhanced Spatiotemporal Analysis for Anomaly Detection in Process Manufacturing’, Computers in Industry, Vol. 161: 104111. .

• Fawaz Almutairi, Meshari Alotaibi, and Anthony R West (2024). ‘Flash luminescence, resistive switching and metal-insulator transitions in ceramic oxides’, Acta Materialia, Vol. 276: 120003. .

• Naif Harthi, Steve Goodacre, and Fiona Sampson (2024). ‘The current status of trauma care for older adults in Saudi Arabia’, Frontiers in Medicine, Vol. 11. .