Dictionary · v2026.1 · CC-BY 4.0
The CASRAI Dictionary: A Research Administration Glossary
The CASRAI Dictionary is a citable, machine-readable controlled vocabulary for research administration, containing 1858 definitions across 29 thematic domains in release v2026.1. Stewarded by 29 community working groups; federated with NISO, euroCRIS, CODATA, and RDA; published under CC-BY 4.0 for unrestricted reuse.
What's in v2026.1
- Entries
- 1858
- Domains
- 29
- Tracks
- 5
- Open formats
- 6
- · Stable URIs per entry
- · Schema.org
DefinedTermmarkup - · JATS · JSON-LD · OWL · RDF · CSV · BibTeX
- · Versioned with semver-style release tags
Start here
Browse the dictionary
Five ways into the full corpus, plus the 29 thematic domains below. Every entry is a stable, citable URI under CC-BY 4.0.
/dictionary/browse
Browse by domain
Entries grouped by their thematic domain, with status and CRIS-readiness filters.
/dictionary/a-z
A–Z index of all 1858 terms
Every entry, alphabetised under A–Z headings — the complete map of the dictionary.
/rdm-glossary
Research data management glossary
A curated RDM glossary: data infrastructure, DMPs, persistent identifiers, and reproducibility.
/dictionary/objects
Object templates
123 structured business objects — Award, Book, Conference Paper — for CRIS and RIM integration.
/dictionary/picklists
Controlled picklists
Enumerated value-lists — output types, contributor roles, licence types, access types.
/dictionary/templates
Document templates
23 composite documents — CVs, funding history, DMP ethics review — assembled from object fields.
/dictionary/search
Full-text search
Search definitions, picklists, sample values, and crosswalks with type-ahead suggestions.
Jump to a domain
29 domains across 6 tracks
The full domain map
Each domain is stewarded by a working group. Click any tile to read its entries.
Domain breakdown
Entries by domain · 1858 total
The full distribution of dictionary entries across the 29 stewardship domains, ordered by size. Track colour indicates stewardship cluster.
Compliance and regulatory
Funding lifecycle and financial vocabulary
Clinical research and clinical trials
Research integrity and misconduct
Scholarly publishing
Grants management and sponsor compliance
Research outputs (expanded)
Research data infrastructure
Responsible research assessment
The persistent identifier ecosystem
Research security
Research-information systems and integration
Mentorship, training, and career stages
Reproducibility and computational research
Generative AI use and disclosure
AI and ML research outputs
Research lifecycle stages and project metadata
Knowledge equity, diversity, global-south inclusion
CRediT extensions and adjacent contribution vocabularies
Technology transfer and commercialization
Engagement, impact, and SDG alignment
Sustainable research and laboratory operations
Machine-actionable data management plans
Life sciences and biology
Consent, privacy, and regulatory disclosure
Indigenous data governance — CARE principles
Earth, environmental, and marine sciences
Space and planetary sciences
Physical sciences and materials
Highlighted terms by domain
One representative entry per domain
A curated tour of high-value definitions — one entry per stewardship domain, chosen to illustrate the breadth of the dictionary in practice.
AI-assisted writing
Text produced with substantive help from a generative AI system, requiring disclosure under most publisher policies.
Lead / equal / supporting qualifier
Modifier appended to a CRediT role to declare relative degree of contribution within that role on a paper.
Narrative CV
Structured-prose researcher biography (Royal Society, UKRI, NIH) replacing publication-list-driven assessment.
Registered report
Two-stage publication where methodology is peer-reviewed and accepted before data collection begins.
ORCID iD
Sixteen-digit researcher identifier resolvable at orcid.org, used to disambiguate authorship across systems.
CERIF
euroCRIS data-model standard for Current Research Information Systems, defining entities for persons, projects, outputs.
Trusted Research Environment
Secure analysis platform where sensitive data is held centrally and researchers bring their code, not the other way around.
Data management plan (DMP)
Living document declaring how research data will be collected, stored, shared, and preserved across the project lifecycle.
Reproducibility
Capacity of an independent party to obtain the same result using the original code, data, and computational environment.
Model card
Structured documentation of an ML model: training data, intended use, performance, limitations, and ethical considerations.
Paper mill
Commercial operation that fabricates manuscripts and authorship slots for sale, a growing integrity threat to journals.
GDPR
EU regulation governing personal-data processing, with extraterritorial reach and direct implications for research data.
NSPM-33
US National Security Presidential Memorandum 33 mandating disclosure of foreign affiliations on federally funded research.
CARE principles
Collective benefit, Authority to control, Responsibility, Ethics — Indigenous Peoples’ data governance principles, complementing FAIR.
DORA
San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment, calling for an end to journal-impact-factor-based evaluation of researchers.
Plan S
cOAlition S mandate requiring immediate open access for publications arising from publicly funded research.
PPI (patient and public involvement)
Research carried out with or by patients and members of the public, not merely about or for them.
LEAF framework
Laboratory Efficiency Assessment Framework — bronze/silver/gold certification for sustainable laboratory operations.
MTDC
Modified Total Direct Cost — the cost base on which US federal indirect-cost rates are calculated, excluding equipment and subawards above $25k.
Project ID (RAiD-anchored)
Research Activity Identifier (RAiD) handle anchoring a project across funders, institutions, outputs, and contributors.
Featured entries
Selected from v2026.1
A taste of what's inside — definitions, picklists, related terms, structured data, all under CC-BY 4.0.
PHS 2590 (Non-Competing Continuation Progress Report)
PHS 2590 is the Non-Competing Continuation Progress Report, a Public Health Service-wide, OMB-approved form (face page, detailed budget for the next period, budget justification, progress-report summary, personnel and inclusion-enrollment reporting) historically filed annually on an already-funded, non-competing award. At NIH, the RPPR (Research Performance Progress Report) now replaces it for all Type 5 non-competing continuation annual progress reports, all project closeouts, and all interim reports; NIH restricts current PHS 2590 use to Type 4 administrative extensions, such as an SBIR/STTR Fast-Track Phase II application. The pre-RPPR SNAP/non-SNAP fork on the 2590 (whether a detailed budget page was required) carried over directly into the RPPR's own Section H budget requirement and due-date calculation. The form now in circulation is the 08/2025 revision, with a current OMB expiration date of 11/30/2027 and the previously required Trainee Diversity Report removed.
CONSORT Flow Diagram for Randomised Trials
The figure required by the CONSORT statement (2025 item 22a) that accounts for every participant in a randomised trial across four stages — enrolment, allocation to intervention, follow-up, and data analysis — reporting a count in each box and, under item 22b, a stated reason for every loss or exclusion occurring after randomisation.
Human Cell Atlas (HCA)
An international, open-science consortium, founded in 2016 and convened by the Broad Institute, the Wellcome Sanger Institute, and Wellcome, that aims to create comprehensive reference maps of every cell type in the human body using single-cell and spatial genomics. The HCA is a distributed research collaboration organized into national/regional networks and topic-specific Biological Networks (not a repository, funder, or formal legal entity), coordinated by an Organizing Committee and Working Groups, publishing data and analysis tools through the HCA Data Portal for free public reuse under its own network-level standards.
Reverse Causality
Reverse causality (also called reverse causation) is the error of assuming a relationship between two variables, X and Y, runs from X to Y when the true causal arrow runs the opposite way -- from Y to X -- or, in the general case, runs both ways at once as a feedback loop. It requires no third variable: the mistake is not that some lurking factor is driving both X and Y (that is confounding), it is that the direction assigned to a real relationship between X and Y is simply backwards. Observing that X and Y are correlated, or even that X was measured before Y, does not establish that X causes Y -- it is equally consistent with Y's own prior trajectory having produced X, which is common whenever both variables are stable traits or slow-moving processes capable of influencing each other over time.
Vivli (concept)
A non-profit, independent clinical-trial data-sharing platform that hosts a searchable catalogue of individual participant-level data (IPD) from completed clinical trials and mediates researcher access to it through a structured, multi-stage request-and-review process rather than open download. Approved researchers analyze the data inside a browser-based secure research environment; the underlying files are never downloaded to the researcher's own machine. Vivli grew out of a project at the Multi-Regional Clinical Trials (MRCT) Center of Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard, and launched publicly in July 2018.
PharmGKB (Now ClinPGx): The Pharmacogenomics Knowledgebase
ClinPGx (the renamed, relaunched successor to PharmGKB, the Pharmacogenomics Knowledgebase) is the NIH-funded, Stanford-hosted resource that curates the evidence linking specific genetic variants to drug response -- clinical annotations, dosing guidelines, and drug-label pharmacogenomic annotations -- and now brings PharmGKB's original knowledgebase together with CPIC's dosing guidelines and PharmCAT's genotype-to-phenotype annotation tool under one platform at clinpgx.org (pharmgkb.org now redirects there). What makes a gene-drug relationship a PharmGKB/ClinPGx entry specifically is that the resource's own curation team has reviewed the evidence and published a structured clinical annotation with an assigned level of evidence under a stable, citable identifier -- not merely that a primary study reported the association.
What you can do here
Browse · search · download · cite · contribute
Browse
By domain or letter
All 1858 entries, grouped by their thematic domain or alphabetically. Filter by status and CRIS-readiness.
Learn moreSearch
Full-text + facets
Search definitions, picklists, sample values, and crosswalks. Type-ahead suggestions across all entries.
Learn moreDownload
Six open formats
JSON-LD · CSV · OWL · RDF Turtle · BibTeX · XLSX. Suitable for CRIS ingestion or local vocabulary servers.
Learn moreCite
Citable URIs + DOIs
Every entry has a stable URI. The dictionary itself has a Dataset DOI (assigned per release).
Learn moreRelated areas of CASRAI
Where to go next
The dictionary sits inside a broader stewardship programme. These adjacent surfaces extend the same vocabulary into roles, adoption tracking, crosswalks, governance, and source bibliography.
/credit
CRediT taxonomy
The 14 contributor roles (conceptualization, methodology, software, writing — original draft, etc.) and the canonical role definitions.
/credit/adoption
Publisher CRediT adoption tracker
Which journals and publishers ingest CRediT taxonomy contributor roles, with adoption status and submission-system support.
/federation/cross-walks
Crosswalks
Field-level mappings from CASRAI entries to DataCite, MARC, ORCID, Schema.org, and other vocabularies.
/about/working-groups
Working groups
The 20 stewardship working groups that draft, review, and ratify dictionary entries on a rolling release cadence.
/standards/releases
Release history
Per-release changelog of added, modified, and deprecated entries since the 2026 revival of CASRAI stewardship.
/resources/bibliography
Foundational bibliography
Peer-reviewed and grey-literature sources underpinning the dictionary entries, organised by domain and theme.
About
What the dictionary is
Provenance, governance, scope, and how the dictionary relates to NISO / euroCRIS / CODATA standards.
Contribute
Propose a term
Working groups review proposals during each release cycle. Community contributions get CRediT attribution.
Releases
v2026.1 release notes
Added, modified, and deprecated entries since the previous release. Versioned and citable.
For implementers and citers
Open, machine-readable, freely reusable
CASRAI Dictionary content is published under CC-BY 4.0. Use it in your CRIS, repository, publisher submission system, CRediT-aware editorial workflow, or in your own controlled-vocabulary infrastructure.
Frequently asked
Dictionary FAQ
- What is the CASRAI Dictionary?
The CASRAI Dictionary is a curated, citable, machine-readable controlled vocabulary for research-administration information. v2026.1 contains 1,858 entries spread across 29 thematic domains, each entry with a stable URI, structured picklists, and Schema.org
DefinedTermmarkup. See about the dictionary for scope and provenance.- How is the Dictionary structured?
The Dictionary is partitioned into 29 thematic domains grouped under 6 stewardship tracks: contributorship, identifiers and systems, computational, governance and integrity, lifecycle and equity, and the research sciences. Each domain is stewarded by a community working group that drafts, reviews, and ratifies its entries. Browse the domain map at /dictionary, or jump to /dictionary/browse for the A-Z view.
- Can I propose a new term?
Yes. Working groups review proposals during each release cycle, and community contributions are credited via CRediT-style attribution in the changelog. Open a proposal at /dictionary/contribute; the relevant working group will route it through the review process for the next versioned release.
- Under what licence are the definitions released?
The CASRAI Dictionary is published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence (CC-BY 4.0). You may reuse, redistribute, and adapt the content commercially or non-commercially, provided you give appropriate credit. Implementation patterns are documented under /implement.
- How do I cite the Dictionary?
Each Dictionary release is citable as a Dataset with a versioned URI (e.g.
https://casrai.org/dictionary/for v2026.1) and per-entry stable URIs athttps://casrai.org/dictionary/term/<slug>. The cite page provides citation strings in APA, BibTeX, and RIS formats.- Where do the legacy CASRAI terms come from?
CASRAI was founded in 2006 and built an extensive legacy dictionary before the 2020 stewardship handover. The 2026 revival re-imported and re-published the legacy entries under their original domains, retaining provenance metadata. The current1,858-entry corpus combines legacy holdings with newly drafted entries. See /about/history for the timeline and /dictionary/changelog for per-release migration notes.
- How many terms are in the CASRAI Dictionary?
The CASRAI Dictionary currently contains 1,858 terms in release v2026.1, distributed across 29 thematic domains grouped under 6 stewardship tracks. Each term has a stable URI, structured definition, optional picklists, and Schema.org
DefinedTermmarkup. The next release, v2026.2 in November 2026, expands the corpus with additional sustainability and AI-disclosure entries. See /dictionary/changelog.- Is the CASRAI Dictionary free?
Yes, the CASRAI Dictionary is free to use. It is published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence (CC-BY 4.0), with no paywall, no registration, and no API spend for read access. You may reuse, redistribute, translate, and bundle it commercially or non-commercially, provided you give appropriate credit to CASRAI.
- How do I cite a dictionary term?
To cite a dictionary term, use its stable URI at
https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/<slug>together with the dictionary release version. Each term page emits a citation widget producing APA, BibTeX, RIS, and Chicago forms on the fly. To cite the release as a whole, use the Zenodo DOI listed on /dictionary/cite.
