Elsevier, a global information analytics business specializing in science and health, has expanded the ‘Contributor Roles Taxonomy’ (CRediT) approach to describing authorship to 1,200 journals - with plans to expand to hundreds more journals throughout 2020.
In a landscape of increasingly collaborative research and multi-authorship, standard author lists at the top of a paper don't always adequately convey the diverse contributions of different individuals. Now when lead authors submit to a journal offering CRediT, they are asked to provide an accurate summary of the roles contributed by each author.
The CRediT statement appears above the acknowledgement section of the paper and details one or more of 14 distinct contributions per author that can go into a scholarly work: conceptualization; data curation; formal analysis; funding acquisition; investigation; methodology; project administration; resources; software; supervision; validation; visualization; writing – original draft; and writing – review and editing.
Authorship disputes typically occur when authors cannot agree on who deserves to be listed as an author. Such disagreements can lead to erosion of professional relationships, delays in publication and occasionally even in the retraction of papers. CRediT can help encourage co-authors to start discussing authorship and who contributed what early in the process, as recommended by COPE, the Committee on Publication Ethics.
The idea came about following a 2012 collaborative workshop led by Harvard University and the Wellcome Trust with input from researchers, the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) and publishers, including Elsevier, represented by Cell Press, and with facilitation from CASRAI and the National Informational Standards Organization (NISO). Cell Press first started offering CRediT to authors in 2015. Aries Systems introduced CRediT into its Editorial Manager (EM) manuscript submission and peer review system in 2016 as an option for any journal using EM. Since 2017, Elsevier has piloted the approach with 150 further journals in all fields, to very positive reception by authors and editors.
As the approach expands and matures, CRediT will advance existing bibliometric methods for author credit assignment, as well as create a culture of responsible use of metrics in research evaluation. This is a topic under active research at Elsevier's recently-launched International Center for the Study of Research (ICSR).
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