A special thank you to Véronique Kiermer, Chief Scientific Officer at PLOS, for her contribution of historical context for CRediT.
The many roles of research
A lot goes into the work of research: studies are conceptualized; funding is secured; methods and software are developed; data is collected, analyzed, and curated. So much of this work is done behind the scenes, and the historical lack of ability to attribute credit in scholarly outputs for all the ways people contribute to research just compounds the invisibility of these roles. ORCID is glad that is changing, and we are proud to launch our support of CRediT (Contributor Roles Taxonomy) alongside existing contributor roles with ORCID’s API 3.0.
Helping members give proper CRediT to their researchers
CRediT was developed collaboratively by a small group of editors, funders, and university administrators starting in 2012; tested in real life scenarios; and refined through broad community consultation. In 2016, journals started implementing the taxonomy, and it is now standard with more than 30 publishers.
“Being able to articulate the diversity of contributions to a study using CRediT, a simple but comprehensive and standardized list of roles, is essential to promote recognition for individual researchers in team science,” says Veronique Kiermer of PLOS. “At PLOS, we were among the first to adopt the CRediT taxonomy because we felt it was really important to display the contributions of each author, in a human- and machine-readable way, in all publications. It’s wonderful to see that functionality now being available on ORCID records.”
With the addition of these 14 contributor roles, research contributors—who may have multiple roles per published work—can now have all facets of their work recognized. When members add this data, information will be filtered to other systems that read ORCID data via the API or public data file, thus creating greater transparency and recognition.
What are the new types of CRediT researchers can get?
The CRediT taxonomy consists of the following 14 contribution types to scholarly work, along with guidelines on how these roles may be assigned:
- 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 re-use
- 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
How can I see the CRediT that’s been added to my record?
CRediT roles added by our members will be made visible by users in the UI in the same way existing roles are. As part of our ongoing work, we are continuing to look at ways we can allow users to include co-author and contributor data when adding research outputs to their ORCID record manually.
Update your integration to start giving CRediT
API 3.0 now supports our existing list of contributor roles and CRediT roles, providing members the opportunity to start using CRediT without having to upgrade to a newer API version.
Integrators that are using an earlier version of the API will not be able to read or write CRediT roles. To prevent any integration issues, we have completed mapping between the existing and the CRediT roles. This means that if there is no direct mapping from the CRediT role to an existing role, then no role information will be returned in the V2.X API.
Our Engagement Team is here to answer any questions that you may have related to this development and are ready to help you update your integration to include the new and much needed contributor roles.
