Contributor roles in humanities

CRediT was not designed for humanities scholarship and several roles do not translate cleanly. There is rarely Investigation in the laboratory sense; Methodology often means an interpretive framework rather than a procedure; Data Curation is awkward when the “data” are archival sources or literary texts. Many humanities papers are sole-authored, and a CRediT statement on a single-author monograph chapter adds little.

Where humanities papers are co-authored — increasingly common in digital humanities, computational literary studies, intellectual history and history of science — a CRediT statement is genuinely useful. The discipline should treat the role labels as starting points for translation rather than rigid bins; the JATS encoding allows free-text qualification of the role assignment.

A growing number of humanities journals — the Wellcome Open Research history-of-medicine titles, the Cambridge Companion online series, the Journal of the History of Ideas, Digital Scholarship in the Humanities — accept CRediT statements. Adoption is patchy and the role definitions remain biomedical-flavoured; the rebuilt CASRAI dictionary will publish a humanities-translation guide alongside the v2026.2 release.

• Conceptualization in humanities is the framing, the argument, the question. Distinguish this from the rhetorical move of writing it up, which belongs under Writing – Original Draft.
• Methodology covers the interpretive framework: hermeneutic approach, archival method, computational technique in digital humanities, philological apparatus in classical studies.
• Investigation covers archival research, manuscript consultation, fieldwork in oral history, interview work in contemporary intellectual history.
• Data Curation in digital humanities covers corpus construction, encoding (TEI XML, for example), and data-cleaning for computational analysis. Name the team member who did this.
• Formal Analysis covers any quantitative or computational work — text-mining, stylometric analysis, network analysis, GIS work.
• For sole-authored work, an explicit CRediT statement is unnecessary; the absence of a co-author list makes the attribution unambiguous.
• Research assistants who contributed substantive Investigation or Data Curation but were not named as authors should be acknowledged with the work they performed, not subsumed into a generic thanks line.