Implementing the CRediT (Contributor Roles Defined) Taxonomy: A Practical Framework for Fairly Attributing Contributions in Academic Research

Abdullah, M. (2025). Implementing the CRediT (Contributor Roles Defined) Taxonomy. Open Educational Resources on English Language Teaching. Retrieved November 04, 2025, from https://www.muhaiminabdullah.com/blog/credit-contributor-roles-defined

The manuscript submission process requires a formal contribution statement. The corresponding author prepares this statement based on the documented roles. Each author is listed with their specific CRediT roles. This breakdown offers immediate clarity to readers, editors, and evaluators.

CRediT List

The CRediT Taxonomy presents a modern solution. CRediT, or Contributor Roles Taxonomy, is a standardized list of 14 roles, which describe specific task(s) of each contributor.

Role Definition
Conceptualization Ideas formulation or evolution of overarching research goals and aims
Data curation Management activities to annotate scrub data and maintain research data for initial use and later re-use
Formal analysis Application of statistical mathematical computational or other formal techniques to analyze or synthesize study data
Funding acquisition Acquisition of the financial support for the project leading to this publication
Investigation Conducting a research and investigation process specifically performing the experiments or data/evidence collection
Methodology Development or design of methodology creation of models
Project administration Management and coordination responsibility for the research activity planning and execution
Resources Provision of study materials reagents materials patients laboratory samples animals instrumentation computing resources or other analysis tools
Software Programming software development designing computer programs implementation of the computer code and supporting algorithms testing of existing code components
Supervision Oversight and leadership responsibility for the research activity planning and execution including mentorship external to the core team
Validation Verification whether as a part of the activity or separate of the overall replication/reproducibility of results/experiments and other research outputs
Visualization Preparation creation and/or presentation of the published work specifically visualization/data presentation
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

The benefits of stating this taxonomy in a scolarly-processed articles are significant. CRediT directly addresses ghost and gift authorship. The framework guarantees credit for all substantive work for each contributor. This approach promotes a more equitable and ethical research culture.