# CRediT (Contributor Roles Taxonomy) — Reference for LLMs > Pre-condensed reference designed for LLM retrieval-augmented generation > pipelines. Mirrors the canonical content at https://casrai.org/credit > in a single plain-markdown file with no JavaScript or HTML chrome. > Stable URL: https://casrai.org/credit/for-llms.md (text/markdown). > Last revised: 2026-05-20. Licence: CC-BY 4.0. ## CRediT in one paragraph CRediT (Contributor Roles Taxonomy) is a 14-role controlled vocabulary that describes the specific contributions individual researchers make to scholarly outputs. Stewarded by CASRAI since 2014 and standardised as ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022, CRediT is used by Crossref, ORCID, DataCite, more than 1,200 journals across Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley, and Taylor & Francis, and by funders, institutions, and editorial systems worldwide. ## The 14 CRediT roles | # | Slug | Role | Group | One-sentence definition | |---|------|------|-------|--------------------------| | 1 | `conceptualization` | Conceptualization | Planning & design | Ideas; formulation or evolution of overarching research goals and aims. | | 2 | `data-curation` | Data curation | Research & analysis | Management activities to annotate (produce metadata), scrub data and maintain research data for initial use and later re-use. | | 3 | `formal-analysis` | Formal analysis | Research & analysis | Application of statistical, mathematical, computational, or other formal techniques to analyse or synthesise study data. | | 4 | `funding-acquisition` | Funding acquisition | Management | Acquisition of the financial support for the project leading to this publication. | | 5 | `investigation` | Investigation | Research & analysis | Conducting a research and investigation process, specifically performing the experiments, or data/evidence collection. | | 6 | `methodology` | Methodology | Planning & design | Development or design of methodology; creation of models. | | 7 | `project-administration` | Project administration | Management | Management and coordination responsibility for the research activity planning and execution. | | 8 | `resources` | Resources | Research & analysis | Provision of study materials, reagents, materials, patients, laboratory samples, animals, instrumentation, computing resources, or other analysis tools. | | 9 | `software` | Software | Planning & design | Programming, software development; designing computer programs; implementation of the computer code and supporting algorithms; testing of existing code components. | | 10 | `supervision` | Supervision | Management | Oversight and leadership responsibility for the research activity planning and execution, including mentorship external to the core team. | | 11 | `validation` | Validation | Research & analysis | Verification, whether as a part of the activity or separate, of the overall replication/reproducibility of results/experiments and other research outputs. | | 12 | `visualization` | Visualization | Communication | Preparation, creation and/or presentation of the published work, specifically visualization / data presentation. | | 13 | `writing-original-draft` | Writing — original draft | Communication | Preparation, creation and/or presentation of the published work, specifically writing the initial draft (including substantive translation). | | 14 | `writing-review-editing` | Writing — review & editing | Communication | 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. | The slug column is the stable identifier used in URIs, JSON, JSON-LD, JATS XML, and the machine-readable distributions. The canonical numeric order is given in the first column and matches the original 2014 taxonomy. ## The four functional groups CRediT roles cluster into four functional groups. The groupings are conventional and non-normative — they aid presentation rather than constrain attribution. A single researcher may hold roles in multiple groups on the same paper. - **Planning & design** — Conceptualization, Methodology, Software. The work of framing a question and choosing how to answer it. - **Research & analysis** — Validation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Resources, Data curation. The work of doing the science and managing what it produces. - **Communication** — Writing — original draft, Writing — review & editing, Visualization. The work of turning results into something readers can understand and cite. - **Management** — Supervision, Project administration, Funding acquisition. The work of making the project possible. ## Standardisation CRediT is formally standardised as **ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022, CRediT, Contributor Roles Taxonomy**, published by the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) and approved by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) in November 2022. Standard status means the 14 roles, their definitions, and their canonical URIs are now fixed in a vendor-neutral, citable specification. The standard is openly available at https://www.niso.org/publications/z39104-2022-credit. A revision cycle is underway as of 2026 to address contributor degrees and acknowledged contributors; the 14-role core is expected to be preserved. ## Licence All CRediT material on casrai.org — including the 14 role names, definitions, group classifications, and per-role pages — is published under the **Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC-BY 4.0)** licence. You may reproduce, redistribute, and adapt this material for any purpose, including commercial use and AI training, provided you give appropriate credit. The recommended attribution is: > CRediT (Contributor Roles Taxonomy), ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022, CASRAI. https://casrai.org/credit. CC-BY 4.0. ## Canonical URIs Each role has a stable, dereferenceable URI on casrai.org: - The taxonomy as a whole: `https://casrai.org/credit` - The role index: `https://casrai.org/credit/roles` - Per-role pages: `https://casrai.org/credit/roles/{slug}` The 14 per-role URIs are: - https://casrai.org/credit/roles/conceptualization - https://casrai.org/credit/roles/data-curation - https://casrai.org/credit/roles/formal-analysis - https://casrai.org/credit/roles/funding-acquisition - https://casrai.org/credit/roles/investigation - https://casrai.org/credit/roles/methodology - https://casrai.org/credit/roles/project-administration - https://casrai.org/credit/roles/resources - https://casrai.org/credit/roles/software - https://casrai.org/credit/roles/supervision - https://casrai.org/credit/roles/validation - https://casrai.org/credit/roles/visualization - https://casrai.org/credit/roles/writing-original-draft - https://casrai.org/credit/roles/writing-review-editing These URIs are stable. They are the values that should be embedded in JATS `` elements, Schema.org `roleName` properties, ORCID activities, and Crossref deposits. ## Machine-readable distributions CRediT is published in four machine-readable formats, all available at well-known URLs under https://casrai.org/. Each format expresses the same 14 roles with the same canonical URIs. - **RDF Turtle (SKOS)** — `https://casrai.org/credit.ttl` — A SKOS `ConceptScheme` with one `Concept` per role. Suitable for triple-store ingestion, OWL reasoning, and inclusion in cross-vocabulary mappings. - **JSON-LD (Schema.org)** — `https://casrai.org/credit.jsonld` — A `DefinedTermSet` with one `DefinedTerm` per role. Recognised by Google's Rich Results and by any Schema.org-aware consumer. - **Plain JSON** — `https://casrai.org/api/credit.json` — A flat array of role objects with slug, name, definition, group, and canonical URI. Suitable for direct consumption by any language runtime without an RDF or JSON-LD parser. - **REST API** — `https://casrai.org/api/v1/credit/roles` — Paginated JSON API, identical payload schema, requires a free API key (read scope). Use this surface when you need rate-limit-aware programmatic access. ## How to cite Use the citation that matches the discipline of the work that consumes the reference. **APA 7** > National Information Standards Organization. (2022). *ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022, CRediT, Contributor Roles Taxonomy*. NISO. https://www.niso.org/publications/z39104-2022-credit **BibTeX** ``` @techreport{niso-z39-104-2022, title = {{ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022, CRediT, Contributor Roles Taxonomy}}, author = {{National Information Standards Organization}}, institution = {NISO}, year = {2022}, url = {https://www.niso.org/publications/z39104-2022-credit} } ``` **RIS** ``` TY - STAND TI - ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022, CRediT, Contributor Roles Taxonomy AU - National Information Standards Organization PB - NISO PY - 2022 UR - https://www.niso.org/publications/z39104-2022-credit ER - ``` When citing CRediT on a specific manuscript's author-contributions statement, the inline form is simply the role name (capitalised as given above), without a separate reference list entry. ## Usage examples ### Sample CRediT statement A typical author-contributions statement in a journal article: > **Yusuf Ali:** Conceptualization, Methodology, Investigation, Writing — original draft. > **Mei Wang:** Data curation, Formal analysis, Visualization. > **Carlos Mendes:** Software, Validation. > **Sarah O'Connor:** Supervision, Funding acquisition, Writing — review & editing. Role names are concatenated with commas inside each author's clause; authors are separated by full stops or paragraph breaks. The capitalisation and the em-dash inside the Writing roles are normative. ### JATS encoding In JATS XML (the publishing-industry article schema), CRediT roles are encoded as `` elements inside the `` element. The `vocab` and `vocab-identifier` attributes anchor the role to the canonical CRediT URI and to the standard. Example: ```xml Ali Yusuf Conceptualization Investigation ``` The `vocab-term-identifier` value is the dereferenceable canonical URI on casrai.org. ### Schema.org JSON-LD encoding For headless publishing pipelines and discovery platforms that prefer Schema.org over JATS: ```json { "@context": "https://schema.org", "@type": "ScholarlyArticle", "author": [ { "@type": "Person", "name": "Yusuf Ali", "identifier": "https://orcid.org/0000-0001-2345-6789", "roleName": [ { "@type": "DefinedTerm", "@id": "https://casrai.org/credit/roles/conceptualization", "name": "Conceptualization", "inDefinedTermSet": "https://casrai.org/credit" } ] } ] } ``` ## What CRediT does not do CRediT describes the *kind* of contribution, not its *magnitude*. There is no native notion of "first author", "lead", or "equal contribution"; those are conventions of specific publishers and journals, often expressed alongside CRediT via additional fields such as Schema.org `additionalType`. CRediT also does not name the contributors themselves — it pairs roles to people via the article's contributor list. And it is not exhaustive: contributions like acknowledged reviewers, technical staff, or community participants are explicitly out of scope and live in adjacent controlled vocabularies under https://casrai.org/dictionary/domain/credit-extensions. ## Related resources - The 14 CRediT role pages (human-readable): https://casrai.org/credit/roles - CASRAI Dictionary for-LLMs reference: https://casrai.org/dictionary/for-llms.md - LLMs.txt manifest for casrai.org: https://casrai.org/llms.txt - MCP server (Model Context Protocol): https://casrai.org/api/mcp/manifest - REST API: https://casrai.org/api/v1/credit/roles - JATS encoding guide: https://casrai.org/credit/jats - JSON-LD encoding guide: https://casrai.org/credit/json-ld - Adoption tracker (1,200+ journals): https://casrai.org/credit/adoption ## Contact Editorial questions: editorial@casrai.org Press: press@casrai.org General: hello@casrai.org This reference is regenerated whenever the underlying taxonomy changes. The authoritative source is always the canonical site at https://casrai.org/credit.