The CRediT Supervision role is broad. The role definition reads: Oversight and leadership responsibility for the research activity planning and execution, including mentorship external to the core team. The role bundles mentorship into Supervision, which leaves the question: should mentorship be a CRediT role of its own? This post lays out the arguments on both sides and proposes a mid-path.
The case for
Three arguments for a dedicated Mentorship role.
First, visibility. Mentorship is a substantial intellectual and time-consuming activity that current CRediT-style contributorship statements largely render invisible. A senior researcher who mentored an early-career colleague through the discovery, the writing, and the navigation of peer review has contributed significantly to the paper; the current taxonomy captures this only through the catch-all Supervision role, which is also used for project oversight that is quite different in character.
Second, career-stage equity. Mentorship contribution is most often delivered by mid-career and senior researchers to early-career ones, and is most often invisibilised in the way it currently is. Making it a CRediT role would help correct the under-recognition of mid-career mentorship work in promotion and tenure decisions. The mentorship and career stages domain at CASRAI tracks the assessment-side implications.
Third, distinction from supervision. Project supervision (the senior researcher with PI responsibility) and mentorship (the senior or peer researcher who guided a junior contributor’s development through the work) are different activities. Bundling them into one role loses the distinction. A paper where the PI did the supervision and a separate mid-career colleague did the mentorship has a contributorship structure that current CRediT cannot express cleanly.
The case against
Three arguments against.
First, taxonomic stability. CRediT has held to 14 roles deliberately. Each addition raises cognitive load and risks the taxonomy becoming unusable through over-specification. Liz Allen and the original CRediT designers have consistently argued that the taxonomy gains value from being small enough to use; adding a Mentorship role pushes against this.
Second, boundary problems. What distinguishes mentorship from supervision, from teaching, from co-authorship, from collaboration? The lines are real but fuzzy. A senior colleague who reviewed the draft and suggested major revisions is doing Writing – review & editing; the same colleague who guided the junior author through how to think about the discovery is doing mentorship; in practice the activities overlap. A role that requires reviewers to distinguish them may produce noise more than signal.
Third, recognition versus contribution. CRediT is a contributorship taxonomy, describing what people did on the paper. Mentorship is broader than per-paper contribution; it is a sustained relationship that spans many papers and many years. Capturing per-paper mentorship in CRediT may be the wrong instrument; a separate mentorship-recognition mechanism (in narrative CVs, in promotion dossiers, in institutional mentorship programmes) may fit better.
A proposed mid-path
We propose a mid-path that addresses the visibility and equity concerns without expanding the CRediT role count.
First, clarify the Supervision definition. The current definition bundles mentorship with project leadership. The bundling could be unbundled within the existing role through definitional refinement: the role description could be revised to explicitly recognise mentorship as a sub-activity within Supervision, with guidance on when each is being discharged. This is a low-cost intervention that does not require a new role.
Second, add a structured qualifier for Supervision. The existing degree-of-contribution qualifier already provides lead/equal/supporting. A sub-qualifier indicating whether the Supervision was project-oriented, mentorship-oriented, or both, would add the granularity without adding a role. This is a small schema change with substantial value.
Third, build the recognition layer outside CRediT. The narrative-CV format, mentorship-specific recognition programmes, and institutional career-development frameworks should carry mentorship recognition at a sustained-relationship granularity that CRediT cannot. The mentorship recognition that early-career researchers most value is not the per-paper notation; it is the cumulative recognition of mentorship across a career. The CASRAI institutional mentorship guide walks through the recognition options.
What CRediT v2026.3 should do
Our recommendation for the v2026.3 revision discussion: do not add a Mentorship role; do refine the Supervision definition to recognise mentorship explicitly; do add a sub-qualifier capturing the project/mentorship/both distinction; do coordinate with the narrative-CV and institutional-recognition communities to ensure that the cumulative mentorship recognition picture is captured outside CRediT.
This is the position we lean toward, with the explicit acknowledgment that reasonable people disagree. The discussion at the December 2025 CRediT stewardship meeting was substantive; the community consultation through 2026 will be the place to settle it. The CASRAI CRediT governance page tracks the consultation process and welcomes input from the broader community.
A broader observation
The mentorship question is one instance of a broader pattern. CRediT, as a per-paper contributorship taxonomy, captures certain things well and certain things less well. The work that spans papers (sustained mentorship, leadership of a community, contribution to standards, infrastructure stewardship) does not fit naturally into a per-paper taxonomy. The right response is not to expand CRediT to cover everything but to build complementary recognition mechanisms for what CRediT does not capture.
This is the argument running through the responsible-assessment community, the narrative-CV adoption push, and the CoARA reform agenda. CRediT is part of the picture, not the whole picture. A senior researcher’s contribution profile is captured by CRediT statements on their papers, by their narrative CV, by their teaching record, by their mentorship record, by their service to the community. The integrated picture is the goal; CRediT is one component.
Practical recommendations
Three for institutions. First, capture mentorship in your institutional records and recognition systems; do not wait for it to be a CRediT role. Second, train promotion-and-tenure committees to read mentorship contribution explicitly when reviewing dossiers. Third, support narrative-CV formats that surface mentorship.
Three for researchers. First, claim your mentorship contribution in narrative CVs and professional records; do not depend on per-paper CRediT to capture it. Second, in CRediT statements, use Supervision appropriately and consider noting the mentorship dimension in the prose contribution statement that accompanies the structured CRediT. Third, contribute to the CRediT consultation if you have a view on the question.
Three for the CRediT stewardship community. First, run the v2026.3 consultation transparently and document the outcomes. Second, coordinate with the responsible-assessment community on the broader recognition picture. Third, treat the question of taxonomic expansion as a serious one with substantive trade-offs, not as a routine update.
