1.7 Contributorship (CRediT)

The Contributor Roles Taxonomy (CRediT) has been designed to cover 14 key roles representing the spectrum of activities involved in the production of research outputs. Most of the big publishers (e.g., Nature, Elsevier, SAGE, Cell Press, Wiley) and psychological societies (American Psychological Association [APA]), Association for Psychological Science [APS]) have made the CRediT system compulsory.

The Contributor Roles Taxonomy (CRediT)

    • Conceptualization
    • Data curation
    • Formal analysis
    • Funding acquisition
    • Investigation
    • Methodology
    • Project administration
    • Resources
    • Software
    • Supervision
    • Validation
    • Visualization
    • Writing—original draft
    • Writing—review and editing

Some of the desired consequences of this contributor system are to avoid:

  • Ghost authorship: Authors who contributed to the work but are not listed, generally to hide a conflict of interest from editors, reviewers, and readers.

  • Gift authorship: Individuals given authorship credit who have not contributed in any substantive way to the research but are added to the author list by virtue of their stature in the organization.

  • Orphan authorship: Authors who contributed materially to the work but are omitted from the author list unfairly by the drafting team.

  • Forged authorship: Unwitting authors who had no part in the work but whose names are appended to the paper without their knowledge to increase the likelihood of publication.