ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022 · CC-BY 4.0
CRediT — Contributor Roles Taxonomy
CRediT (Contributor Roles Taxonomy) is the ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022 standard for naming the 14 distinct roles researchers play in producing a published work. It replaces the binary author / non-author model with structured per-role attribution, adopted by 50+ major publishers since 2014.
Four functional categories
The 14 roles, grouped
The taxonomy organises roles into four categories: conceptual + analytic, methods + materials, supervision + management, and writing + presentation.
Planning & design
- Conceptualization#1
Ideas; formulation or evolution of overarching research goals and aims.
- Methodology#6
Development or design of methodology; creation of models.
- Software#9
Programming, software development; designing computer programs; implementation of the computer code and supporting algorithms; testing of existing code components.
Research & analysis
- Data curation#2
Management activities to annotate (produce metadata), scrub data and maintain research data (including software code, where it is necessary for interpreting the data itself) for initial use and later re-use.
- Formal analysis#3
Application of statistical, mathematical, computational, or other formal techniques to analyse or synthesise study data.
- Investigation#5
Conducting a research and investigation process, specifically performing the experiments, or data/evidence collection.
- Resources#8
Provision of study materials, reagents, materials, patients, laboratory samples, animals, instrumentation, computing resources, or other analysis tools.
- Validation#11
Verification, whether as a part of the activity or separate, of the overall replication/reproducibility of results/experiments and other research outputs.
Communication
- Visualization#12
Preparation, creation and/or presentation of the published work, specifically visualization / data presentation.
- Writing — original draft#13
Preparation, creation and/or presentation of the published work, specifically writing the initial draft (including substantive translation).
- Writing — review & editing#14
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.
Management
- Funding acquisition#4
Acquisition of the financial support for the project leading to this publication.
- Project administration#7
Management and coordination responsibility for the research activity planning and execution.
- Supervision#10
Oversight and leadership responsibility for the research activity planning and execution, including mentorship external to the core team.
CRediT replaces the opaque authorship byline with an explicit, machine-readable map of contributions. That makes individual research labour visible — and unlocks downstream uses that the byline simply could not support.
Why contributorship
Beyond the author byline
The traditional author byline conceals more than it reveals. CRediT replaces the opaque "first author / last author / corresponding author" convention with explicit, machine-readable attribution of each contribution. That makes individual research labour visible — and unlocks downstream uses: tenure committees, funder evaluation panels, science-of-science researchers, and authorship-dispute resolution all benefit.
CRediT is not a replacement for ICMJE Vancouver authorship criteria — those define who is an author. CRediT defines what each author (and acknowledged contributor) did. The two are complementary.
Definition
What is CRediT?
CRediT (the Contributor Roles Taxonomy) is a 14-role controlled vocabulary for describing each individual contribution to a scholarly research output. Formally published as the US national standard ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022 on 8 February 2022, CRediT replaces the opaque "first author / last author / corresponding author" convention with explicit, machine-readable, byline-level attribution of research labour. Every role is identified by a stable URI at casrai.org/creditand is licensed permissively under CC-BY 4.0, which makes embedding, redistribution, translation, and tooling reuse explicit defaults rather than negotiated exceptions.
The taxonomy originated with the working group convened at a Harvard / Wellcome Trust workshop in May 2012, was introduced to the scholarly community in the 2014 Nature paper by Allen, Brand, Scott, Altman, and Hlava (doi.org/10.1038/508312a), and was stewarded as a community vocabulary by CASRAI from 2014 until 2022 when ANSI approved the formal standard and NISO took over maintenance. The substantive content — the 14 roles, their definitions, and the optional lead / equal / supporting degree qualifier — has been stable across that decade. For the full origin story from 1997 to today, see our history page; for the standardisation specifics, see what ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022 changed.
CRediT is used by 50+ publishers across thousands of journals worldwide, including PLOS, eLife, Cell Press, Elsevier, Wiley, Springer Nature, MDPI, Frontiers, Taylor & Francis, SAGE, Cambridge University Press, and Oxford University Press. It is recognised across disciplines — biomedical, social-science, humanities, computational — and is encoded natively in JATS XML, Crossref deposit, ORCID contribution records, and Schema.org via the Schema.org Role property.
At a glance
The 14 CRediT roles at a glance
The taxonomy groups its 14 roles into four functional categories. Each category captures a different stage or kind of contribution; together they cover the full life-cycle of a research output. Roles are non-exclusive — a single contributor can and routinely does hold several — and the taxonomy is output-agnostic: it applies equally to data papers, software papers, methods papers, registered reports, and traditional research articles. Browse the full set on the 14 roles index, or use the inline links below to jump to any single role's canonical page.
Planning & design
The roles that frame the research question, choose how to answer it, and build the software infrastructure to do so. These are the contributions that determine what the study is actually about and how it will be executed. Conceptualization, Methodology, Software.
Research & analysis
The hands-on roles: collecting data, running experiments, providing materials and instrumentation, analysing what comes out, curating the resulting datasets, and verifying that results are reproducible. This is where most of the visible labour of a study actually happens. Data curation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Resources, Validation.
Communication
The writing and presentation roles. CRediT splits "writing" deliberately into two roles — original drafting versus critical review and editing — to make visible the substantive difference between a contributor who produced the first version of the manuscript and one who returned a marked-up revision. Visualization is the third communication role: figures, charts, tables, and data presentation. Visualization, Writing — original draft, Writing — review & editing.
Management
The roles that keep the project running: leadership and mentorship, day-to-day coordination, and securing the funding that pays for everything else. These are often invisible in a traditional byline but are the difference between a study that completes and one that does not. Funding acquisition, Project administration, Supervision.
Each role has a canonical NISO URI (https://casrai.org/credit/roles/<slug>) and a CASRAI page with definition, encoding examples, citation blocks, and FAQs. For the formal definitions in full, see the 14 roles overview; for crosswalks to adjacent vocabularies, see our crosswalk tables.
Workflow
How to use CRediT — in 60 seconds
The minimum-viable workflow for adopting CRediT on a manuscript or research output has four steps. Most submission systems now collect CRediT structurally so you do not need to format anything by hand — but knowing the underlying flow helps you produce clean statements and check what the journal exports downstream.
- Identify contributors. List everyone who meaningfully contributed, whether or not they meet your target journal's authorship bar. ICMJE-qualifying contributors will appear in the byline; others (medical writers, technical staff, postdocs, instrumentation specialists) belong in the acknowledgements with their CRediT roles.
- Assign roles. For each contributor, pick the subset of the 14 roles that genuinely describe what they did. You do not need to use all 14. Optionally add the lead / equal / supporting degree qualifier where several people share a role.
- Include in the contribution statement. Add a "CRediT author statement" paragraph at the end of the manuscript (or fill in the submission system's structured form). See our for-authors guide for worked examples and the citation page for canonical phrasing.
- Encode in JATS at submission. If you submit a JATS-formatted manuscript or the journal converts to JATS during production, each contributor role becomes a
<role>element on the<contrib>withvocab="credit"and avocab-term-identifierpointing at the canonical casrai.org/credit URI. The pattern is documented at /credit/jats and the schema mappings at /implement/jats.
Publishers receive structured CRediT through their own implementation pipeline; submission-system playbooks for ScholarOne, Editorial Manager, eJP, and OJS are at /implement/submission-systems.
Authorship versus contributorship
CRediT vs traditional authorship — what's different?
The most common source of confusion about CRediT is the assumption that it competes with — or replaces — the established authorship criteria used by medical and scientific journals. It does not. CRediT supplements traditional authorship; it does not supersede it. The two address different questions, and most journals that adopt CRediT continue to apply their own authorship policy alongside.
The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) Recommendations — the Vancouver criteria — define who qualifies as an author. Authorship under ICMJE requires four conditions: substantial contributions to conception, design, data acquisition, analysis, or interpretation; drafting or critical revision; final approval of the version to be published; and accountability for the integrity of the work. ICMJE answers the gatekeeping question of who appears in the byline.
CRediT answers a different question: what did each author — and each acknowledged contributor — actually do. It is a vocabulary for annotating contributions, not a filter for excluding them. A medical writer who does not meet ICMJE authorship can still carry a CRediT role of Writing — original draft in the acknowledgements; an ICMJE-qualifying author can carry multiple roles describing the specifics of their contribution beyond "co-author."
The two systems are explicitly compatible. NEJM, The Lancet, JAMA, and the BMJ all collect both, and the ICMJE itself acknowledges CRediT as a useful complement in its recommendations. For CRediT applied specifically in medical-research contexts, see our medical-research author hub; for the full author-side workflow, see /credit/for-authors.
Adoption
CRediT adoption — by the numbers (2026)
CRediT adoption has accelerated steadily since the taxonomy's formalisation in 2022. ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022 was approved by ANSI on 14 January 2022 and published by NISO on 8 February 2022, giving publishers, funders, and infrastructure providers an unambiguous standard to reference in policy. 30+ major publishers now support CRediT across their portfolios, with Cell Press as the 2014 pioneer adopter followed by PLOS and eLife mandating CRediT portfolio-wide from 2017. By 2026, the cumulative count of articles published with CRediT statements has crossed 100,000+ across the major publishers, with the per-year rate now in the tens of thousands.
Infrastructure adoption keeps pace. ORCID has supported CRediT roles on contribution records since 2018, enabling researchers to carry their role-level history with their identifier across institutions and outputs. ScholarOne and Editorial Manager — the two largest manuscript- submission platforms in scholarly publishing — both ship native CRediT support; PubSweet (eLife, Coko), Open Journal Systems (via the CRediT plugin), and Scholastica round out the submission-system landscape. CRediT has its own Wikipedia article and is referenced in policy by funders including Wellcome, the NIH, and several European national funders.
Implementation depth varies — many publishers still collect a narrative paragraph rather than structured CRediT metadata. For the live tracking table, the structured-vs-narrative gap, and the public scorecard launching with Dictionary v2026.2, see our adoption page; for the submission-system implementation playbooks, see /implement/submission-systems.
Disciplines
CRediT for medical research, social sciences, humanities
CRediT was originally piloted in biomedical journals — the 2012 Harvard / Wellcome workshop convened editors from medical and life-science publications — but the 14-role vocabulary is intentionally discipline-agnostic. The roles describe kinds of intellectual and operational contribution rather than kinds of subject matter, and they apply cleanly across STEM, clinical, social-science, and humanities research alike.
In medical and clinical research, CRediT integrates with the ICMJE authorship framework and is collected by NEJM, The Lancet, JAMA, the BMJ, the Cell Press portfolio, and most society journals. Roles such as Investigation (data collection, performing experiments), Resources (recruiting patients, providing instruments, supplying laboratory samples), and Validation are particularly load-bearing in clinical contexts. See our medical-research author hub and discipline guidance for biomedical research.
In social sciences — qualitative research, mixed-methods studies, policy research, ethnography — CRediT roles map onto familiar workflow stages: Conceptualization for research-question framing, Methodology for protocol design, Data curation for interview transcripts and coding frames, and the two writing roles for drafting versus critical revision. See guidance for qualitative researchers.
In the humanities — literary studies, history, philosophy, digital humanities — CRediT applies to multi-author monographs, edited collections, digital-edition projects, and collaborative scholarly editions. Roles like Software and Visualization are increasingly relevant as digital humanities projects publish code and interactive visualisations alongside text. See humanities author guidance.
Implementation
Implementing CRediT — links to operational guides
Once you have settled on CRediT as a vocabulary, the practical work is encoding it into the machine-readable artefacts your downstream consumers expect. CASRAI maintains a set of operational guides for the most common encodings and deposit targets. For JATS XML — the dominant article-level encoding in scholarly publishing — see CRediT in JATS XML for the JATS4R-conformant <role> pattern, and /implement/jats for the full schema mapping. For Schema.org / JSON-LD — what search engines and Knowledge-Graph consumers read — see CRediT as JSON-LD for the contributor + Role pattern.
For Crossref deposit, contributor roles are carried via the <contributor_role> element with the casrai.org/credit URI; see /implement/crossref. For DataCite deposit of data and software outputs, see the contributorType mapping at /implement/datacite. For ORCID push — making a researcher's CRediT-tagged contributions visible on their ORCID profile — see /implement/orcid. For submission-system playbooks (ScholarOne, Editorial Manager, eJP, OJS), see /implement/submission-systems; for cross-walks to adjacent vocabularies including DataCite contributor types, MARC relator codes, and Schema.org Role, see /federation/cross-walks.
For LLM and RAG pipelines, CASRAI publishes a condensed, retrieval-augmented-generation-ready reference at /credit/for-llms — the same content in plain markdown, JSON-LD, RDF Turtle, and JSON, declared in Schema.org as a TextDigitalDocument with audience.audienceType = "AI language models". Point your ingestion at the markdown distribution rather than scraping the HTML taxonomy pages, and your retrieved chunks will line up with the canonical NISO definitions.
FAQ
FAQ — common questions about CRediT
The questions below cover the most common points of confusion we see from researchers, publishers, and infrastructure providers approaching CRediT for the first time. For implementation-specific FAQs see /credit/citation; for ICMJE-related questions see /credit/for-authors.
- What does CRediT stand for?
- CRediT stands for Contributor Roles Taxonomy. It is a controlled vocabulary of 14 standardised roles used to describe what each person actually contributed to a research output, replacing the opaque first-author / corresponding-author convention with explicit, machine-readable attribution, formalised as ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022.
- Who created the CRediT taxonomy?
- CRediT was developed by a working group convened at a 2012 Harvard / Wellcome Trust workshop. Liz Allen, Amy Brand, Jo Scott, Micah Altman, and Marjorie Hlava introduced the 14-role taxonomy in their 2014 Nature paper, "Publishing: Credit where credit is due" (Nature 508:312–313). CASRAI took stewardship from 2014.
- What are the 14 CRediT roles?
- The 14 CRediT roles are Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Funding acquisition, Investigation, Methodology, Project administration, Resources, Software, Supervision, Validation, Visualization, Writing — original draft, and Writing — review & editing. They are grouped into four functional categories spanning planning, research, communication, and management.
- Is CRediT mandatory for publication?
- CRediT is mandatory at a growing number of publishers, including PLOS, eLife, Cell Press, BMJ, and the AAAS Science family across their full portfolios, with Elsevier, Wiley, Springer Nature, MDPI, Frontiers, Taylor & Francis, SAGE, OUP, and CUP supporting it portfolio-wide. Other publishers accept CRediT optionally — see /credit/adoption.
- How is CRediT different from authorship?
- CRediT supplements authorship, it does not replace it. ICMJE Vancouver authorship criteria define who qualifies as an author of a paper; CRediT defines what each author and acknowledged contributor actually did, using 14 standardised roles. Authorship is gatekeeping the byline; CRediT is annotating it. Most major journals collect both.
- Who maintains CRediT today?
- CRediT is maintained by the NISO CRediT Standing Committee under ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022. NISO publishes the standard and operates the canonical identifier namespace at casrai.org/credit. CASRAI remains the originator and community-facing reference site, and participates in the Standing Committee alongside publishers, libraries, and infrastructure providers.
- How do I write a CRediT statement?
- To write a CRediT statement, list each contributor by name and assign them the subset of the 14 CRediT roles describing what they actually did, optionally with a lead / equal / supporting qualifier. Capture this in the structured field your journal provides at submission rather than as free-text in the back-matter.
- What is ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022?
- ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022 is the formal US national standard for the Contributor Roles Taxonomy, approved by ANSI on 14 January 2022 and published by NISO on 8 February 2022. It codifies the 14 CRediT roles, the optional lead / equal / supporting qualifier, and the canonical identifier namespace at casrai.org/credit, under CC-BY 4.0.
- Which publishers use CRediT?
- More than 50 publishers use CRediT, including PLOS, eLife, Cell Press, BMJ, AAAS Science family, and the Nature Portfolio as native adopters, alongside Elsevier, Wiley, Springer Nature, MDPI, Frontiers, Taylor & Francis, SAGE, Cambridge University Press, and Oxford University Press supporting it portfolio-wide. See /credit/adoption for the live tracker.
- Can a single author have multiple CRediT roles?
- Yes. A single author or contributor can and routinely does hold several CRediT roles on the same output, with no upper limit. The taxonomy is non-exclusive by design — a first author commonly carries Conceptualization, Methodology, Investigation, and Writing — original draft. Contributors do not need to fill all 14 roles; only those that genuinely apply.
- Is CRediT free to use?
- Yes, CRediT is free to use. ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022 is published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence (CC-BY 4.0), which permits commercial reuse, translation, redistribution, embedding in tooling, and inclusion in submission systems, provided attribution is given to NISO. No fee, no licence agreement, no registration is required.
- How do I cite CRediT?
- The formal citation is: National Information Standards Organization (2022). ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022, CRediT, Contributor Roles Taxonomy. NISO. https://casrai.org/credit/standardization. For the originating paper cite Allen et al. (2014), Nature 508:312–313, https://doi.org/10.1038/508312a. See /credit/citation for APA, Vancouver, Chicago, BibTeX, and RIS forms.
- What does the lead / equal / supporting qualifier mean?
- CRediT supports an optional "degree" qualifier on each role: lead, equal, or supporting. Use it when several contributors share the same role and you want to signal who took primary responsibility (lead), who contributed in roughly the same measure (equal), or who provided ancillary input (supporting). The qualifier is optional and most useful on multi-author papers.
- Can I translate CRediT into another language?
- Yes. ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022 is published under CC-BY 4.0, which explicitly permits translation. The NISO CRediT Standing Committee maintains authorised translations in French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, and several other languages. New translations are welcomed; see /credit/translations for the per-language status grid.
- Where do I find the canonical machine-readable URI for a CRediT role?
- Every role has a stable URI at https://casrai.org/credit/roles/<slug> — for example https://casrai.org/credit/roles/conceptualization for Conceptualization. These are the identifiers JATS XML, Crossref deposit, and ORCID push consume. CASRAI mirrors each role at /credit/roles/<slug> with definition, encoding examples, and citation blocks.
- Does CRediT apply to data papers, software papers, and registered reports?
- Yes. CRediT is output-agnostic — the 14 roles describe contributions to any scholarly research output, including data papers, software papers, methods papers, registered reports, preregistrations, preprints, and protocols. Some output types lean more heavily on certain roles (e.g. software papers on Software, data papers on Data curation) but the taxonomy itself is unchanged.
- How does CRediT relate to ORCID?
- CRediT and ORCID are complementary. ORCID identifies who a contributor is (a persistent identifier for a person); CRediT describes what that contributor did. Since 2018, ORCID has supported CRediT roles on contribution records, so a researcher’s ORCID profile can carry per-output role-level attribution. See /implement/orcid for the push API.
Citation
Cite this CRediT overview page
If you are referencing this CASRAI overview specifically (rather than the underlying NISO standard or the originating Allen et al. paper), use one of the formats below. To cite the standard itself, the originating paper, or an individual role, see the canonical citation page.
CASRAI Editorial Board. (2026). CRediT — Contributor Roles Taxonomy (v2022.1). CASRAI. https://casrai.org/credit
CASRAI Editorial Board. CRediT — Contributor Roles Taxonomy [Internet]. Version v2022.1. CASRAI; 2026 [cited 2026]. Available from: https://casrai.org/credit
CASRAI Editorial Board. 2026. "CRediT — Contributor Roles Taxonomy." Version v2022.1. CASRAI. https://casrai.org/credit.
@misc{casrai_credit_overview_2026,
author = {{CASRAI Editorial Board}},
title = {{CRediT --- Contributor Roles Taxonomy}},
year = {2026},
version = {v2022.1},
publisher = {CASRAI},
howpublished = {\url{https://casrai.org/credit}},
note = {Aligned with ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022. Licensed CC-BY 4.0.}
}Further reading
Further reading
For the foundational literature on contributorship and the CRediT taxonomy specifically, our resources bibliography collects the primary papers, position pieces, and empirical studies. The five external resources below are the canonical primary sources you will likely cite most often:
- Allen, L., Brand, A., Scott, J., Altman, M., & Hlava, M. (2014). Publishing: Credit where credit is due. Nature, 508, 312–313. doi.org/10.1038/508312a — the originating paper.
- Brand, A., Allen, L., Altman, M., Hlava, M., & Scott, J. (2015). Beyond authorship: attribution, contribution, collaboration, and credit. Learned Publishing, 28(2), 151–155. doi.org/10.1087/20150211 — the follow-on theoretical case.
- ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022, CRediT, Contributor Roles Taxonomy — the formal standard, free PDF.
- NISO CRediT Standing Committee — the maintenance body and committee membership.
- casrai.org/credit — the canonical identifier namespace and per-role landing pages.
Where to go next
Explore CRediT in depth
Each of the 14 contributor roles has its own canonical-definition page with encoding examples, citation blocks, FAQs, and worked examples — start with Conceptualization, Methodology, Data curation, Software, Writing — original draft, or Writing — review & editing, and browse the complete index of all 14 CRediT roles.
To see how individual publishers collect CRediT in their submission systems, read the per-publisher adoption profiles for Elsevier CRediT adoption, Wiley CRediT adoption, Springer Nature CRediT adoption, and PLOS CRediT adoption — or the full CRediT adoption tracker.
For the originator narrative — how CRediT moved from a 2012 Harvard workshop and the 2014 Nature paper through CASRAI stewardship to the 2022 NISO standard — see the history of the Contributor Roles Taxonomy. Authors writing a contribution statement should start with our CRediT author statement guidance and the for-authors workflow.
CRediT sits inside a wider vocabulary for research administration. Browse the CASRAI Dictionary and the research-data-management glossary, and explore the dictionary terms most closely tied to contributorship — Non-author contributor, Peer reviewer contribution, Mentorship contribution, Data steward role (in DMP), Software paper, and Code availability statement — each cross-linked back to the CRediT roles they support.
Going deeper
Standard, origins, adoption
Standard
ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022
Approved Jan 2022, published Feb 2022. Stewarded by NISO under the CRediT Standing Committee.
Origins
From Harvard to NISO
A 2012 workshop, the 2014 Nature paper, CASRAI stewardship, and the 2022 NISO standardisation.
Landscape
Adoption today
PLOS, eLife, Cell Press, Elsevier, Wiley, Springer Nature, MDPI, Frontiers, T&F, SAGE, CUP, OUP — 50+ organisations.
Canonical authoritative source: casrai.org/credit (NISO)
