Direct comparison
CRediT vs ICMJE authorship — what is the difference?
CRediT and ICMJE Vancouver criteria describe different things and complement rather than compete. ICMJE defines who counts as an author; CRediT describes what each author (and acknowledged contributor) actually did.
Side-by-side comparison
| Dimension | ICMJE Vancouver | CRediT |
|---|---|---|
| What it defines | Who counts as an author | What each contributor did |
| Origin | International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (1978, Vancouver Group) | Harvard / Wellcome / HHMI 2012 workshop; CRediT 1.0 published 2014; ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022 |
| Number of items | Four criteria (all four required to be an author) | 14 roles (any number can apply per contributor) |
| Mutual exclusion | Yes — authorship vs acknowledgement is binary | No — one person can hold multiple roles |
| Machine-readable | No — narrative criteria | Yes — controlled vocabulary with stable URIs |
| Standard body | ICMJE (no formal national/international standardisation) | ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022 (formal US national standard) |
| Adoption by publishers | Universal in biomedical publishing (~10,000 journals) | 50+ publishers, thousands of journals (2026) |
| Funder mandates | No formal funder mandate | Not formally mandated but increasingly expected on funded publications |
| Replaces the other? | No — defines authorship | No — defines contributions |
Common questions
FAQ
Should I use both?+
Yes. ICMJE defines who can be on the byline; CRediT describes what each person did. Most journals now require both — an author meeting ICMJE criteria gets listed, and their CRediT roles describe their actual contributions.
Can a CRediT contributor not be an author?+
Yes — that's the design. People who contributed (e.g., a research assistant who did data collection) but don't meet all four ICMJE author criteria can be acknowledged contributors with their CRediT roles listed.
Does CRediT solve authorship disputes?+
It reduces them. Explicit per-role attribution makes "who did what" visible, which prevents many disputes. ICMJE remains the eligibility criterion.
Going deeper
