CRediT Contributor Roles Taxonomy Example: A 5-Author, Multi-Site Study Walkthrough

A credit contributor roles taxonomy example works best as a full worked matrix: all 14 CRediT roles mapped against every named contributor, so that overlapping statistical, clinical, and writing work on a multi-author study becomes explicit rather than assumed from author order. This article builds that matrix, role by role, for a hypothetical five-author, three-site trial.

CRediT (the Contributor Roles Taxonomy) is a fourteen-role controlled vocabulary for describing the specific type of contribution each named contributor made to a research output, independent of author order or seniority. CASRAI originated CRediT in 2014; the taxonomy is now formally stewarded by NISO as ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022, approved in 2022 and licensed CC-BY 4.0 for free reuse by any publisher, funder, or institution.

• What is the CRediT contributor roles taxonomy?
• The hypothetical study: a five-author, three-site trial
• Role-by-role: assigning all 14 CRediT roles
• Common questions about CRediT contributor roles
• Implications for multi-site studies — and what comes next

What is the CRediT contributor roles taxonomy?

The CRediT contributor roles taxonomy lists fourteen discrete role types: Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Funding acquisition, Investigation, Methodology, Project administration, Resources, Software, Supervision, Validation, Visualization, Writing – original draft, and Writing – review & editing. Any contributor can hold multiple roles, and any role can be shared by multiple contributors.

Under the NISO standard, each shared role can optionally carry a degree-of-contribution qualifier:

• Lead — this person did most of the work for that role
• Equal — contribution was shared roughly evenly with named co-contributors
• Supporting — a secondary, assisting contribution to that role

These qualifiers are what make a worked example useful: a bare list of role names tells a reader little, but a role assigned “Lead” versus “Supporting” against a specific name tells them exactly how the work divided.

The hypothetical study: a five-author, three-site trial

To make the taxonomy concrete, consider a hypothetical trial: “Effects of a community-based exercise programme on cardiometabolic risk markers,” run across three sites — a lead university, a partner university running local recruitment, and an NHS trust providing the clinical setting. Five people are named as contributors:

• Dr Amara Osei — Chief Investigator, lead university
• Dr Rhys Bevan — Co-investigator and site lead, partner university
• Dr Priya Nair — Biostatistician, lead university
• Fatima Choudhury — Research nurse and clinical trial coordinator, NHS trust site
• Dr Tomasz Wolski — Postdoctoral researcher, lead university

This spread is deliberately realistic: it mirrors the multi-site, mixed-role structure of a typical funded clinical or field trial, where no single person can plausibly claim every contribution, and where author contributions examples published in journals routinely span exactly this kind of team.

Role-by-role: assigning all 14 CRediT roles

Working through each role in turn, rather than starting from “who is first author,” keeps the exercise honest. Below is the completed matrix for this hypothetical team.

Reading the matrix

Three things stand out that a title-only author list would hide. First, Dr Nair, the biostatistician, holds five roles (Formal analysis, Software, Validation, Visualization, and a shared Data curation) despite not being first or corresponding author. Second, Fatima Choudhury — a research nurse, not a doctoral-level academic — leads Investigation and Resources, reflecting that she ran the clinical site day-to-day. Third, no single person leads more than four roles; the workload is genuinely distributed across the three sites, which is precisely the pattern credit contributor roles taxonomy assignment is designed to surface.

Writing the published CRediT statement

Once the matrix is agreed, it converts directly into the “Author Contributions” text that journals such as Elsevier, Wiley, and Taylor & Francis titles require at submission:

“Amara Osei: Conceptualization, Funding acquisition, Supervision, Methodology (supporting), Writing – review & editing (equal). Rhys Bevan: Methodology (lead), Investigation (equal), Project administration (lead), Writing – review & editing (equal). Priya Nair: Formal analysis, Software, Validation, Visualization, Data curation (equal). Fatima Choudhury: Investigation (lead), Resources, Data curation (equal), Project administration (supporting). Tomasz Wolski: Writing – original draft, Conceptualization (supporting), Formal analysis (supporting), Visualization (supporting), Writing – review & editing (equal).”

This is a genuine statement of contribution example built directly from the matrix above — nothing in it needs to be reverse-engineered from a vague sentence like “all authors contributed equally,” which contributes no verifiable information at all.

Common questions about CRediT contributor roles

What is CRediT contributor role taxonomy?

CRediT is a standardised, fourteen-role vocabulary for describing what each named contributor actually did on a research output, rather than relying on author position alone. It was originated by CASRAI in 2014 and is now formalised as ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022, used across most major scholarly publishers at submission.

What are the 14 CRediT contributor roles?

The fourteen roles are Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Funding acquisition, Investigation, Methodology, Project administration, Resources, Software, Supervision, Validation, Visualization, Writing – original draft, and Writing – review & editing. Multiple contributors can share any single role, each optionally marked lead, equal, or supporting.

How do you write a contributorship statement?

List every named contributor, then assign each of the fourteen CRediT roles they actually performed, using degree-of-contribution qualifiers where a role is shared. Agree the matrix among all co-authors before submission — the ICMJE and COPE both flag late, undiscussed contributorship claims as a common source of authorship disputes.

In what order should authors be listed?

Author order is a separate decision from CRediT roles and typically reflects relative overall contribution, with the corresponding author (often, but not always, first or last) taking responsibility for the submission. CRediT does not replace author order — it supplements it with role-level transparency that order alone cannot convey.

Implications for multi-site studies — and what comes next

Multi-site teams like the hypothetical trial above create a specific governance risk: contributions made at a partner site or NHS trust are structurally easy to under-credit if roles are assigned only by the lead institution after the fact. Building the matrix role-by-role, rather than writing a summary sentence, forces every site’s actual work — clinical coordination, statistical modelling, field recruitment — into the open before submission.

For research offices and institutional repositories, a completed CRediT matrix is also increasingly machine-readable output metadata: DataCite and CrossRef schemas can carry contributor roles alongside ORCID iDs, feeding directly into research information systems without re-keying. As more funders request contributor-level reporting alongside authorship criteria, teams that build the habit of completing a full role matrix — not just a name list — will find compliance largely already done. Institutions building their own role-assignment workflows can start from the individual role definitions to check edge cases the matrix above does not cover.