Profile
Composite institution profile
| Institution type | Chinese 985 / Double First-Class research university |
| Size | ~5,500 academic staff; ~18,000 outputs annually, ~62% English-language and ~38% Chinese-language |
| Country / region | China |
| Research areas | Engineering, materials science, life sciences, computer science — strong international co-authorship pattern |
| CRIS / repository | Custom-built CRIS with a Chinese-language UI and an Elsevier Pure integration layer for international reporting |
The challenge
What problem were they trying to solve?
The university produced about 62% of its outputs in English-language international journals — mostly engineering, materials, and life sciences — and about 38% in Chinese-language domestic journals across all disciplines. Contribution metadata existed on the international side: Cell Press, Elsevier portfolio journals, and PLOS were emitting structured CRediT, and the university's Pure integration was picking it up. On the Chinese-language side, almost nothing. The Ministry of Education's domestic publication reporting system had its own contribution-disclosure format (Chinese: 贡献声明, "contribution statement") that varied by journal and was almost always narrative-only. The Vice-Provost for Research wanted parity: every researcher's contribution history should look the same regardless of whether the underlying publication was in English or Chinese, and the same researcher should not have to fill in contribution metadata twice. The constraint was that the Chinese-language UI had to be the primary interface for most researchers — English-only would have excluded a large fraction of the humanities and social-sciences faculty.
The approach
How they implemented it
The technical team built the CRediT taxonomy into the custom CRIS as a first-class bilingual concept: each of the 14 NISO roles got a canonical English label, a canonical Simplified Chinese translation reviewed by a working group of senior researchers from across the university, and a definition in both languages. The CASRAI canonical English terms and definitions were used as the source of truth; the Chinese translations were pinned as aliases of the same underlying concept (the same architectural pattern used by the EU regional consortium for its four-language translations). The capture workflow had two entry points. For international English-language publications, structured CRediT arriving from Cell Press, Elsevier, and the wider Crossref-deposited cohort was imported automatically and surfaced to the researcher in the Chinese-language UI as confirmation rather than data entry. For Chinese-language publications, the workflow added a CRediT capture step modelled on the deposit-form approach used at the US R1 university in the same case-study cohort: at the moment of recording the publication in the CRIS, researchers were prompted to assign the 14 roles, with the role definitions and examples displayed in both languages. The workflow also produced a Ministry-of-Education-compliant 贡献声明 narrative on demand, auto-drafted from the structured CRediT roles, which researchers could edit before submission. International reporting through the Pure integration consumed the same source-of-truth data.
Timeline
Rollout phases
- Months 1–3
Bilingual CRediT taxonomy adopted
Senior-researcher working group reviewed Simplified Chinese translations of the 14 NISO roles. Translations pinned as aliases of the canonical English concept, not as separate concepts.
- Months 4–6
CRIS data model + Pure import
Custom CRIS extended with bilingual contribution-role storage. Pure import layer connected; existing English-language structured CRediT from international publications backfilled.
- Months 7–9
Chinese-language capture step
Deposit-form capture step added for Chinese-language publications. Help text in both languages; examples drawn from real (anonymised) institutional publications across disciplines.
- Months 10–12
MoE-compliant narrative export
贡献声明 narrative auto-drafted from structured roles. Pilot tested with three departments across humanities, materials science, and computer science. Researcher feedback driven into v2.
- Year 2
Institution-wide rollout
Workflow rolled out to all ~5,500 faculty. Library helpdesk staffed in Chinese for the autumn reporting cycle.
Outcomes
Illustrative outcomes
Every metric below is illustrative — synthesised from observed patterns across multiple adoption journeys, not attributed to a single real institution.
~62% / ~38%
English-language / Chinese-language output split, now unified
14 + 14
CRediT roles documented in both English and Simplified Chinese
~91%
of international publications had structured CRediT imported automatically
~78%
of Chinese-language publications captured CRediT at deposit by end of year 1
1 form
rather than two (international Pure + MoE 贡献声明) — researchers fill once
~6,200
researcher contribution profiles now bilingual and consistent
Lessons learned
What they would tell the next institution
- 01Bilingual at the concept level, not at the form level. Treating Chinese and English as two labels of one underlying CRediT role made every other architectural decision easier. Treating them as two parallel taxonomies would have led to drift.
- 02The senior-researcher translation working group was the highest-leverage early decision. Translations done by a generic translation agency would have used technically-correct terms that no working researcher would recognise.
- 03Auto-drafting the MoE 贡献声明 narrative from structured roles solved the political constraint that "domestic reporting must look domestic." The Ministry sees a narrative; the structured data sits behind it.
- 04Help-desk staffing in Chinese was non-negotiable. Year-1 saw twice the helpdesk volume of comparable English-only rollouts elsewhere; year-2 levelled out.
- 05Researchers in humanities (Chinese-language-heavy) and engineering (English-language-heavy) had very different concerns. Treating them as one cohort missed important UX differences; year-2 added discipline-specific help text.
What's next
Planned next steps
Year 2 focuses on two extensions: connecting the workflow to the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) progress-reporting system, and contributing the Simplified Chinese translations of the 14 CRediT roles back to the CRediT translations programme at /credit/translations so they are available to other Chinese-language institutions under CC-BY 4.0. The translation working group is also reviewing whether Traditional Chinese variants should be produced for Taiwan and Hong Kong adoption.
Q&A with the composite project lead
Composite project-lead Q&A
The questions and answers below are composite — synthesised from interview patterns across multiple real project leads. They are not attributed to a specific real person.
- Why pin Chinese translations as aliases rather than separate concepts?
- To avoid drift. If 概念化 (Conceptualization) became a separate concept from the English Conceptualization, they would eventually have two definitions that disagreed. Treating Chinese as a localised label of the same underlying NISO concept means there is exactly one definition that gets translated, never re-invented. The architectural pattern is the same one the EU regional consortium adopted for its four languages.
- How did you handle the Ministry of Education's narrative-only convention?
- By auto-drafting the narrative from the structured data. The MoE's reporting system expects a 贡献声明 in narrative form; we generate that narrative on the fly from the CRediT roles a researcher has captured. The researcher can edit it before submission. The structured data sits behind the narrative; the MoE never sees the structured form, but the institution has it for internal reporting and for the Pure-based international view.
- What did the senior-researcher working group push back on?
- The exact label for "Resources." The NISO definition (provision of study materials, reagents, materials, etc.) does not have a single clean Simplified Chinese equivalent in research-administration usage, and the working group spent two meetings debating between 资源支持, 资源提供, and 物质支持. They eventually picked 资源支持 with a long parenthetical definition. That kind of negotiation is exactly why a working group of researchers, not a translation agency, had to do this work.
- Will you publish the translations?
- Yes, under CC-BY 4.0, back to the CASRAI /credit/translations programme so any other Chinese-language institution can adopt them without reinventing the work. The translation file is in the same JSON-LD format CASRAI uses for the other CRediT translations, so consumption is mechanical for any CRIS that already supports the multilingual CRediT cross-walk.
Cited CASRAI resources
