CRediT Taxonomy

Last Updated: April 2026

Developed by a global consortium of stakeholders, CRediT aims to reduce ambiguity and potential conflicts in authorship. By moving beyond simple author lists to detailed contribution statements, we ensure that every contributor receives proper credit for their specific role in the research process.

Authors are required to provide CRediT roles during the submission stage. These descriptions are captured in the metadata and published alongside the final article for the public record.

The 14 Contributor Roles

To provide a transparent account of individual contributions, authors must select from the following standardized roles:

Conceptualization: Development of research 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.
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 fabricate 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 post-publication 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.

Mandatory Requirements

Under the mandatory requirements of this policy, all listed authors must be assigned at least one specific CRediT role to ensure transparency in authorship. It should be noted that certain journals may enforce stricter dependencies, such as the mandatory inclusion of 'Writing' and 'Validation' roles for every listed contributor. Authors are therefore advised to verify the specific implementation of CRediT and any additional requirements on the individual journal’s homepage prior to completing their submission.