The structured Contributor Role Taxonomy (CRediT) taxonomy, was introduced in 2014, in response to the shift to contribution to complement (or replace) the concept of authorship. The need emerged following increasing dissatisfaction with established bibliographic conventions for describing and listing authors on scholarly outputs. In addition, the bibliographic conventions were outdated and unable to convey the diversity of contributions that researchers made to published work.
Today, just over 120 individual journals, publishers, open research platforms, and system integrators have already implemented the taxonomy for their authors. That number is set to increase substantially during 2019 following Elsevier’s decision to use CRediT in many more journals. In the future, it is essential to ensure further implementations ensure the terms are captured as metadata in any final published article to realize all the benefits of CRediT. There is also increased interest and potential to use it to capture contributions beyond the life and physical sciences.
Finally, to facilitate and optimize adoption by researchers, new tools that allow a research team to record CRediT contributions collaboratively upstream in the research cycle should be developed. Early and frequent discussions about the authorship as the research project is ongoing or the results are being drafted are the most effective way of avoiding author disputes. In this instance, CRediT can provide a framework to facilitate these discussions while not dictating which contribution determines authorship.
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