CRediT – Contributor Roles Taxonomy

When authors submit an article to a publisher who is participating in CRediT  they will be asked to describe their individual contributions using the CRediT taxonomy. The CRediT descriptions will be published alongside the article. This supplies readers with a more complete understanding of each author's role in the research. 

The taxonomy consists of 14 roles: Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal Analysis, Funding acquisition, Investigation, Methodology, Project administration, Resources, Software, Supervision, Validation, Visualization, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing. See https://credit.niso.org/ for more information.  

CRediT

• provides a more open, standardized and transparent approach to authorship
• ensures that all contributors receive appropriate credit for their work across all aspects of research including writing, data curation and statistical analysis
• enables Equality, Diversity and Inclusivity by recognising all contributors regardless of status or any other characteristic
• reduces ambiguity and potential conflicts regarding authorship

Not all publishers are using the CRediT taxonomy. See this list of adopters of CRediT for the names of publishers who are using CRediT. 

At Kent we are supporting CRediT at this early stage because it allows authors to be open and transparent about roles and contributions. This supports Open Research and is part of a research culture that values honesty and respect.   

We have adapted KAR to accommodate CReDiT to capture detailed author contributions to facilitate recognition for all involved. 

We will only add CRediT information to an entry in KAR 

• when it is present in the published article on the publisher page  
• when the roles used on the published article are as stated in the CRediT taxonomy

For each article an author information section on the KAR landing page displays CRediT and ORCID information for the Kent author, when this information is present in the KAR record.

Examples of KAR entries that include CRediT information:

https://kar.kent.ac.uk/105524/ 
https://kar.kent.ac.uk/104841/ 
https://kar.kent.ac.uk/103493/ 
https://kar.kent.ac.uk/104785/ 
https://kar.kent.ac.uk/105092/ 

1. use the "person details" section in the "Bibliographic description" page in KAR to define CRediT roles for each author of an article
2. where multiple individuals serve in the same role, the degree of contribution can be specified as ‘lead’, ‘equal’, or ‘supporting’.  This is optional and is not yet adopted by many publishers. This information should only be added if present on the publisher page
3. multiple CRediT roles can be applied to one author