Research librarianship
For research librarians
The library is typically the first point of contact for researchers asking about CRediT, narrative CVs and persistent identifiers. Here is what the work looks like in practice and where to find tested guidance from peer institutions.
The three operational asks
Research librarians supporting CRediT and narrative-CV adoption typically converge on three operational workstreams. The first is author guidance integration: surfacing CRediT alongside the existing open-access, publisher-deposit and copyright pages, so that a researcher exploring submission options finds the contributor-role guidance in the same place. The exemplars below show how UCL, Sheffield, HKUST and others have positioned that material.
The second is narrative-CV adoption training. UKRI made the Resume for Research and Innovation (R4RI) mandatory across UKRI applications in January 2024; Wellcome and the Royal Society use closely-related formats; the NIH Biosketch has carried a narrative module since 2015. Library training sessions on how to write the four R4RI modules — contributions to the generation of knowledge, development of individuals, the wider research community, and broader society — have become a standard part of the research-development calendar at UK and increasingly US institutions. The CASRAI narrative-CV guide is the canonical author-facing material.
The third is persistent-identifier workshops. ORCID registration is now expected by most funders and publishers; ROR for institutional affiliation is the corresponding institution-level identifier; RAiD is the project-level identifier increasingly required by ARDC and the Australian funder bodies. The PID guide is the author-facing material; library-led workshops typically combine an ORCID registration walkthrough, an explanation of ROR and RAiD, and a hands-on session on linking ORCID to the institutional CRIS.
Where it fits in the existing library research-support offer
In most institutions the work sits alongside existing research-data-management, open-access publishing and bibliometrics workstreams. The library is not a primary CRediT registrar — that work lives with the researcher, the publisher and the CRIS — but the library is well placed to do the upstream literacy work: explaining what CRediT is, why narrative CVs require it, and how the persistent identifiers connect the data together.
Worked examples
Library guidance pages worth borrowing from
All under copyleft or institutional licences that allow adaptation with attribution. We link rather than republish so that the canonical version remains with the originating institution.
- UCL Library Services: CRediT taxonomy
- University of Sheffield: Contributor Role Taxonomy (CRediT)
- HKUST Library: Authorship Matters — Using CRediT for Credit
- MSK Library: Giving CRediT Where Credit is Due
- University of Surrey: Open Research — Authorship and contributorship
- Singapore Management University: CRediT your contribution
Working with the research office and the CRIS team
The library, the research office and the CRIS administrator share the institutional rollout between them. In most institutions the library handles researcher-facing literacy work, the research office handles funder-facing reporting workflows, and the CRIS team handles the underlying data plumbing. Pre-rollout agreement on which workstream owns what saves the predictable confusion about who runs the workshop, who maintains the guidance page and who answers the ticket when a researcher cannot find their CRediT statement in the institutional profile.
The CASRAI training-materials page collects workshop decks, posters and FAQ packs released under CC-BY 4.0; institutions are welcome to adapt them to local context.
External anchors
- ORCID — the canonical researcher identifier.
- ROR — the Research Organization Registry.
- casrai.org/credit — the canonical NISO source for the CRediT vocabulary.
- UKRI Resume for Research and Innovation — the operative R4RI guidance.
