More and more often, researchers join forces in order to implement large-scale scientific projects or prepare publications. In such conditions, it is especially important to clearly delineate each participant’s area of responsibility in order to avoid conflict situations and misunderstandings. How can roles be properly distributed in the process of co-authorship? How can the CRediT taxonomy help with this? Today we will look into this.
How does the distribution of roles affect teamwork?
The organisation of work in a team is the key to the success of a joint project. When two or three authors work on an article, it is much easier to distribute responsibilities than when the number of participants exceeds five people. In such cases, misunderstandings and conflict situations may arise during the collaboration or after it has ended due to a lack of understanding of the extent of each researcher’s contribution.
It is extremely important to distribute participants’ responsibilities even before the start of work, because this:
- makes the scientific process more transparent, and journal editorial offices and other scientists are able to assess the scope of work of each co-author
- guarantees fairness in the recognition of achievements, and each researcher receives proper credit precisely for the part of the project they carried out
- minimises the likelihood of misunderstandings and disputes regarding issues of authorship and contribution to the research
- opens up opportunities for professional growth, as a researcher can demonstrate their competence in certain areas, from data processing to methodology development or the creation of visual content
What is CRediT and how did it emerge?
CRediT is a standardised taxonomy that was developed back in 2014 within the CASRAI consortium, and later became an official standard.
It became an official standard and is now actively used by hundreds of journals around the world to better describe each author’s contribution to a scientific project. CRediT provides greater transparency in the publication process and makes it possible to clearly determine exactly what contribution each author made.
14 roles according to the CRediT taxonomy
As we noted above, the CRediT taxonomy offers 14 different roles for researchers who work in co-authorship. Next, we will consider each of them in more detail and determine what duties they entail.
| Role | Scientist’s responsibilities |
|---|---|
| Conceptualisation | Developing the idea, formulating the hypothesis, setting the research objectives. |
| Data curation | Organising, storing, and documenting data. |
| Formal analysis | Statistical processing, mathematical modelling, interpretation of results using specialised methods. |
| Funding acquisition | Preparing grant applications, searching for and obtaining funds. |
| Investigation | Direct performance of experiments, fieldwork, collection of primary data. |
| Methodology | Creating or improving methods, protocols, and the research design. |
| Project administration | Coordinating the team’s work, planning, and monitoring deadlines. |
| Resources | Providing equipment, reagents, access to databases, samples, laboratories, and so on. |
| Software | Writing, testing, or adapting code, scripts, and software. |
| Supervision | Overall scientific leadership, mentoring junior colleagues, and overseeing the work of the team. |
| Validation | Checking results, reproducibility, accuracy, and verification of data. |
| Visualisation | Preparing graphs, charts, diagrams, and infographics for the article. |
| Writing – original draft | Creating the first version of the article text. |
| Writing – review & editing | Substantial revision, critical editing, preparing responses to reviewers. |
How to properly format authors’ contributions in accordance with CRediT?
When submitting an article, in most modern journals it is necessary to fill in a section called “Author Contributions” or a special form. In such cases, authors must indicate the responsibilities of each co-author. This may look like this:
- Author No. 1: Conceptualisation, Methodology, Writing – original draft, Supervision.
- Author No. 2: Investigation, Validation, Visualisation, Writing – review & editing.
- Author No. 3: Formal analysis, Software, Data curation.
- Author No. 4: Funding acquisition, Resources, Project administration.
In this way, the journal editorial office will find it much easier to determine the scope of work performed by each member of the research team.
The CRediT taxonomy is not just a fashionable trend, but a practical tool that helps to avoid misunderstandings and structure researchers’ work. Thanks to a clear distribution of roles, it ensures transparency of authorship contributions, promotes fair recognition of each participant’s work in the research, and increases trust in scientific publications.
If you are planning a publication in co-authorship, please contact the company Scientific Publications. We will help you format your article properly, select a journal for publication, and support you at all stages of work. To receive a free consultation, please fill in the form below, and our manager will contact you as soon as possible. Together to the new scientific achievements!
