For Authors · By discipline
Contributor roles by discipline
The 14 CRediT roles apply across every field, but the convention-mix and worked examples differ. Pick your discipline for tailored guidance on assigning roles, with paste-ready Author Contributions statements.
Choose your field
12 discipline guides
Biomedical research
Contributor-role conventions for bench, translational and basic biomedical research papers in the Cell, Nature, Science, NEJM and Lancet portfolios.
Read the guide →Discipline guideClinical trials
Contributor roles for interventional clinical trials, with the additional registration, reporting and trial-management metadata that ICMJE, SPIRIT and CONSORT require.
Read the guide →Discipline guideSurgical research
Contributor roles for surgical case series, trials and innovation reports, against the IDEAL framework and the SCARE / PROCESS reporting standards.
Read the guide →Discipline guideEpidemiology
Contributor roles for observational, cohort and case-control studies. Aligned with the STROBE checklist and the increasingly standard requirement for pre-registration of analysis plans.
Read the guide →Discipline guidePublic health
Contributor roles for health-services, implementation-science and population-level intervention studies. CRediT is supplemented by stakeholder-engagement and policy-translation roles that the standard does not yet cover.
Read the guide →Discipline guideBasic science
Contributor roles for fundamental laboratory and theoretical work in molecular biology, chemistry, physics and the wider basic sciences.
Read the guide →Discipline guideQualitative research
Contributor roles for ethnographic, interview, focus-group and document-analysis research. The CRediT taxonomy needs careful re-reading in this context; it works, but the role definitions don’t self-translate.
Read the guide →Discipline guideHumanities
Contributor roles for humanities scholarship. CRediT is a forced fit here; we explain where it does and does not work, and what to do for sole-author and small-team monographs and articles.
Read the guide →Discipline guideClinical Medicine
Contributor-role conventions for clinical medicine research, clinical trials, case reports, systematic reviews, and observational studies under international standards (ICMJE, CARE, CONSORT, STROBE, and PRISMA).
Read the guide →Discipline guidePharmacology & Pharma
Contributor-role conventions for preclinical pharmacology, pharmacokinetics (PK/PD), toxicological assays, and translational drug development under GxP regulatory standards.
Read the guide →Discipline guideBiology
Contributor-role conventions for molecular, cellular, genomic, and organismal biology, aligning with MDAR reproducibility standards and ARRIVE 2.0 animal guidelines.
Read the guide →Discipline guideChemistry
Contributor-role conventions for synthetic, analytical, computational, and materials chemistry, aligned with IUPAC, RSC, and ACS reporting standards.
Read the guide →Ecosystem foundations
The discipline-specific guides build upon foundational scholarly metadata standards and terminology. Connect with the underlying specifications:
Author resources
Understand publishing workflows, attribution conventions, and editorial policies for modern research output:
