This page is part of MIT's Guidelines for Ethical Authorship and Publication Practices.
The Contributor Roles Taxonomy (CRediT) is a simple, standardized way to identify how each person contributed to a research or scholarly project. It includes 14 common roles—reproduced below with the supporting role descriptions—that help make everyone’s contributions clear and visible. CRediT was created to support transparency, reduce confusion around authorship, and make collaboration easier. It grew out of a 2012 workshop led by Harvard University and the Wellcome Trust, with input from researchers, publishers, and groups like the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE). The best way to prevent authorship misunderstandings is to talk about contributions early and often. CRediT doesn’t decide who should be an author—instead, it provides a shared language to guide those conversations. One person can hold multiple roles, and multiple people can share the same role. When helpful, contributions can also be described as lead, equal, or supporting to better reflect how the work was shared.
Role |
Description |
|---|---|
Conceptualization |
Ideas, formulation of overarching research goals and aims. |
Data curation |
Management activities to annotate (produce metadata), scrub data and maintain research data (including software code), which is necessary for reusing the data held by the repository. |
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 of the research activity planning and execution. |
Resources |
Provision of study materials, computing resources, or other analysis tools. |
Software |
Programming, software development; design and implementation of the software; testing of existing code and its validation. |
Supervision |
Oversight and leadership responsibility for the research activity planning and execution, including mentorship outside of 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 visualizing and presenting the research result. |
Writing - original draft |
Preparation, creation and/or presentation of the published work, specifically writing the initial draft. |
Writing - review and edit |
Preparation, creation and/or presentation of the published work issued from the original research group, specifically critical commentary or revision—including pre- or post-publication stages. |