CASRAI Dictionary

Tag: Crossref metadata

  • How Do I Find an Author’s ORCID iD? Editor Guide

    To find an author’s ORCID iD as an editor, first check the manuscript submission record for an authenticated iD, then search the public ORCID registry by name, email, or affiliation, and cross-check any match against the author’s known publication list before adding it to your records. An ORCID iD is a 16-digit, ISO 27729-compatible persistent identifier that uniquely distinguishes one researcher from every other researcher with a similar name.

    For editorial staff, finding the right ORCID iD matters more than finding an ORCID iD. A mismatched or unverified iD attached to a published article is difficult to correct after indexing in Crossref and abstracting databases. This guide sets out a practical verification workflow for editors and publishers checking author identity during submission and peer review.

    What is an ORCID iD and why does it matter for editorial verification?

    An ORCID iD is a free, persistent digital identifier issued by ORCID, Inc. that links a researcher to their outputs — manuscripts, grants, datasets, and peer reviews — independently of name spelling, institutional affiliation, or career moves. ORCID launched the registry in October 2012 specifically to solve the name-disambiguation problem in scholarly publishing: common surnames, transliteration variants, and married-name changes routinely misattribute work between researchers.

    For editorial teams, an ORCID iD is not just a courtesy field on a submission form. It is the identifier that Crossref, DataCite, and most manuscript-tracking systems use to link a person to their DOI-bearing outputs — which is why getting the right iD is an editorial integrity issue, not an administrative one.

    How do you search the ORCID registry for an author by name, email, or DOI?

    The most reliable route is never a manual search: it is an authenticated OAuth connection, where the author logs into ORCID from your submission system and grants permission to share their iD. Most major platforms (ScholarOne, Editorial Manager, OJS) support this ORCID Connect integration and remove transcription error entirely, since the author supplies their own verified iD.

    When authentication is not available — for a co-author who has not logged in — search the public registry directly:

    • By name: Enter the full given name and family name at orcid.org, adding a middle name or variant if the surname is common.
    • By affiliation: Combine the name with a current or former institution — the record’s “employment” section is searchable metadata.
    • By email: If the author has set an email as findable, a direct search returns an exact match; many keep this private by default, so no result does not mean no iD.
    • By existing publication (DOI): Check the article’s Crossref metadata record — publishers increasingly embed contributor ORCID iDs against each DOI, letting you confirm identity via prior work.
    Verification method Reliability Best used when Limitation
    Authenticated OAuth (ORCID Connect) Highest Submission system supports iD sign-in Requires author to actively authenticate
    Registry name search Medium Author has not authenticated but has a distinctive name Common names return multiple candidates
    Registry search by affiliation Medium-high Name is common; institution is known Affiliation data may be self-asserted, not verified
    Crossref/publisher metadata by DOI High Author has a prior published, DOI-bearing work Only works if a previous publisher embedded the iD
    Google Scholar / institutional profile Low-medium Cross-checking a candidate match, not sourcing one Never a primary source — profiles are unverified and editable

    What if the author has no ORCID iD, or you find multiple candidate matches?

    If a registry search returns no result, do not assume the author lacks an iD — their record may be set to private. The correct next step is to ask the author to register (this takes under a minute) or authenticate via your submission system, rather than proceeding without one.

    If a search returns several candidates with a similar name, treat every one as unconfirmed. Compare each candidate’s listed employment, works, and subject area against what you already know from the cover letter, affiliation line, and reference list. Where doubt remains, contact the author and ask them to supply and authenticate their own iD — never select the “closest-looking” record on a common surname alone.

    • Never publish an ORCID iD you have not independently confirmed belongs to the submitting author.
    • Treat self-reported iDs typed into a form with the same scepticism as an unverified email address — request authentication where the workflow allows it.
    • Log which verification method was used (authenticated, registry-matched, or author-supplied) for your own audit trail.

    How do you verify that an ORCID iD is genuine and correctly formatted?

    Every valid ORCID iD follows a strict, checkable format: sixteen digits in four groups of four (for example, 0000-0002-1825-0097), where the final character is a checksum digit calculated using the ISO/IEC 7064:2003 MOD 11-2 algorithm. A mistyped or fabricated iD can often be caught immediately — if the checksum fails against the preceding fifteen digits, the iD is malformed and should be queried before use.

    ORCID also distinguishes self-asserted data (anything a researcher typed in themselves) from source-verified data (affiliations, works, and funding pushed directly from a trusted employer, funder, or publisher via the ORCID API), marked with a visual trust indicator. When disambiguating a candidate match, weight source-verified entries far more heavily than self-asserted ones, since the latter can be entered by anyone with account access.

    How should ORCID verification fit into submission and peer-review workflows?

    The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) treats accurate author identification as a core plank of publication integrity, since misattributed authorship undermines both credit and accountability. Building ORCID verification into the submission stage — rather than retrofitting it at proof stage — is the most efficient intervention point, because it is the only stage where the author is present to authenticate their own iD.

    Funder policy adds independent pressure: UKRI has required ORCID iDs on many grant and fellowship applications since 2017, and cOAlition S signatory funders increasingly expect grant-linked outputs to carry a verified iD through to publication. A journal verifying ORCID iDs at submission is therefore also supporting the author’s compliance obligations to their funder.

    Many submission systems now collect ORCID iDs at the same step as CRediT contributor role declarations, since both serve the same purpose: attributing specific contributions to a specific, disambiguated person. Combining the two into a single identity-and-contribution step is the practical shape a defensible author identity verification policy takes.

    Answer-first Q&A: common author-ORCID questions

    Can I find someone’s ORCID iD?

    Yes. Anyone can search the public ORCID registry by name, and the record’s basic details — the iD itself, plus any information the researcher has marked public — are visible without an account. If the person has not registered, or has restricted their profile to private, a name search may return no usable result even though they exist in the registry.

    Is an ORCID iD public?

    The iD number itself is always public once created, by design, so it can function as a reliable identifier across publishers, funders, and institutions. However, the surrounding record — works, employment, education, funding — is controlled by the researcher through granular, per-item visibility settings, so a public iD does not guarantee a fully populated public profile.

    How do I check whether an author already has an ORCID iD?

    Search the author’s full name at orcid.org and scan for a record whose listed employment or works match what you already know about them. Because duplicate registrations are common with frequent name-changers or common surnames, treat a single unconfirmed hit as a lead, not a confirmation, and verify against the author’s own submission or a source-verified affiliation before relying on it.

    What this means for editorial teams going forward

    As more publishers embed ORCID iDs into DOI metadata via Crossref, the “search by DOI” route above will only get more reliable — every properly tagged prior publication becomes a verification point for the next. Editorial teams that build authentication-first collection into submission systems now, rather than relying on manual registry searches, will spend less time on post-publication correction requests as ORCID coverage across the literature grows.

  • CRediT Taxonomy Author Contributions & ORCID: Linking Roles to Identifiers

    ORCID iDs supply the verified identity, and the CRediT contributor role taxonomy supplies the verified action — publishers deposit both together in Crossref and DataCite metadata, which then push the paired role and identifier straight into each contributor’s ORCID record. That two-way link is what closes the loop between “who contributed” and “who this person verifiably is”.

    Recording credit taxonomy author contributions is only half of a durable scholarly record. Without a persistent identifier attached to each role, a contribution statement is just free text — unverifiable, unsearchable, and impossible to reconcile across a researcher’s career. CRediT (Contributor Roles Taxonomy) is a controlled vocabulary of 14 standardised roles — such as Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, and Writing – original draft — used to describe the specific contributions individuals make to a research output. CASRAI originated the CRediT contributor role taxonomy in 2014; the standard is now stewarded by NISO as ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022. This article is a developer-facing walkthrough of how ORCID, Crossref, DataCite, and JATS XML combine to make each role machine-readable and identity-verified.

    An ORCID iD is a persistent digital identifier that distinguishes one researcher from every other researcher sharing a name, institution, or field. On its own, a CRediT role is just a label — “Formal analysis” attached to a name string carries no guarantee that the name string maps to one real, disambiguated person. Pairing the two closes that gap: the role states what was done, the ORCID iD verifies who did it.

    This matters for three distinct audiences. Institutions use role-plus-identity data to evidence individual contribution in tenure and promotion files, particularly for early-career researchers whose specific input is otherwise buried in a long author list. Funders use it to trace who performed which type of work across grant-funded outputs. Publishers and infrastructure providers — Crossref, DataCite, JATS4R — use it to keep the scholarly record machine-readable rather than dependent on parsing free-text acknowledgements.

    How does an ORCID iD get attached to a CRediT role?

    The attachment happens at the manuscript-submission stage, not after the fact. When an author submits to a participating journal, the manuscript submission system (MSS) requires each co-author’s authenticated ORCID iD and asks the submitting or corresponding author to assign one or more of the 14 CRediT roles to every contributor. All named contributors are expected to review and agree their assigned roles before the manuscript proceeds.

    CRediT has been integrated into Aries Systems’ Editorial Manager since 2016 and into Clarivate’s ScholarOne Manuscripts since 2018, and is available as a free plug-in for the Public Knowledge Project’s Open Journal Systems (OJS). Two optional refinements are supported but not mandatory under the CRediT standard itself: an individual can hold more than one role, the same role can be assigned to multiple individuals, and a publisher may optionally record a “degree of contribution” — lead, equal, or supporting — where several people share a role.

    Note that CRediT does not define authorship. It describes the specific contributions made to a research output and is designed to complement, not replace, authorship criteria such as those set out by the ICMJE.

    Developer reference: CRediT role IDs

    For machine-to-machine interoperability, each of the 14 CRediT roles carries its own persistent role identifier (a UUID), issued by NISO. These IDs — not the plain-text role labels — are what should be embedded in JATS XML markup and passed through the Crossref/DataCite metadata pipeline alongside the contributor’s ORCID iD.

    CRediT role Persistent role ID (UUID)
    Conceptualization 8b73531f-db56-4914-9502-4cc4d4d8ed73
    Data curation f93e0f44-f2a4-4ea1-824a-4e0853b05c9d
    Formal analysis 95394cbd-4dc8-4735-b589-7e5f9e622b3f
    Funding acquisition 34ff6d68-132f-4438-a1f4-fba61ccf364a
    Investigation 2451924d-425e-4778-9f4c-36c848ca70c2
    Methodology f21e2be9-4e38-4ab7-8691-d6f72d5d5843
    Project administration a693fe76-ea33-49ad-9dcc-5e4f3ac5f938
    Resources ebd781f0-bf79-492c-ac21-b31b9c3c990c
    Software f89c5233-01b0-4778-93e9-cc7d107aa2c8
    Supervision 0c8ca7d4-06ad-4527-9cea-a8801fcb8746
    Validation 4b1bf348-faf2-4fc4-bd66-4cd3a84b9d44
    Visualization 76b9d56a-e430-4e0a-84c9-59c11be343ae
    Writing – original draft 43ebbd94-98b4-42f1-866b-c930cef228ca
    Writing – review & editing d3aead86-f2a2-47f7-bb99-79de6421164d

    The JATS4R (JATS for Reuse) working group, a NISO initiative, publishes best-practice guidance for tagging these role IDs inside <contrib> elements in JATS XML, ideally under JATS 1.2 (JATS 1.1 can still carry CRediT tagging with minor adaptation). Marking up role and ORCID iD together at the XML level — rather than only in human-readable HTML — is the step that makes the taxonomy queryable at scale.

    What happens to CRediT data after publication?

    Once a manuscript is accepted, the publisher deposits the authenticated ORCID iDs and assigned CRediT roles inside the article’s metadata record. That record goes to Crossref for journal articles and books, and to DataCite for datasets and other non-article outputs. Crossref’s own strategy roadmap confirms that CRediT role fields are being added to its metadata schema for publisher deposit in 2026, extending machine-readable contribution data beyond the publishers who currently support it only through their own MSS integrations.

    Both Crossref and DataCite maintain an auto-update integration with ORCID: once metadata is deposited and the researcher has granted permission, the publication record — including the specific CRediT role — is pushed automatically into the contributor’s ORCID record. No manual re-entry is required. Where a publication predates this pipeline, or where a publisher does not yet support automated deposit, a researcher can add the CRediT role to a work already listed on their ORCID record manually.

    Common questions about ORCID and CRediT

    What are the 14 CRediT contributor roles?

    The 14 CRediT 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. Each carries its own persistent role ID for machine-readable tagging in JATS XML and Crossref/DataCite metadata.

    Do CRediT roles count as authorship?

    No. CRediT is not designed to determine authorship. It describes specific contributions to a research output and is intended to complement, not replace, authorship frameworks such as the ICMJE criteria. A contributor can hold a CRediT role — for example, Data curation — without meeting the separate threshold for authorship credit.

    How do I list author contributions?

    Assign one or more CRediT roles to every contributor, agree the assignments with all co-authors before submission, and, where the journal supports it, attach each contributor’s authenticated ORCID iD in the manuscript submission system so the roles are captured in structured, machine-readable metadata rather than free text.

    What should substantial contributions include to be credited as an author?

    Under ICMJE criteria, authorship requires substantial contribution to the work’s conception, design, data acquisition, analysis, or interpretation; drafting or critically revising it; final approval of the published version; and agreement to be accountable for its accuracy and integrity — all four criteria together, not any one alone.

    Implications and what’s next

    For institutions and research offices, the practical implication is straightforward: an ORCID iD without linked CRediT roles, or CRediT roles recorded only as prose in an acknowledgements paragraph, both fall short of a queryable contribution record. Research administrators evaluating authorship disputes or preparing tenure files should request the structured, role-tagged version wherever a publisher offers it.

    For developers and publishing-systems teams, the near-term action is to track Crossref’s 2026 metadata-schema rollout and adopt JATS4R’s tagging guidance now, so that role-plus-identifier pairs are captured at first deposit rather than retrofitted. As more manuscript submission systems and repositories adopt this pairing by default, the taxonomy’s original purpose — a transparent, disambiguated account of who did what — becomes something search and assessment systems can actually query, not just something a human reader can parse. Further background on the taxonomy’s individual roles is available in CASRAI’s CRediT roles reference and the broader CRediT hub.

  • CRediT Taxonomy Form: From Submission Checkbox to Crossref Metadata

    The credit taxonomy form is the checkbox interface built into manuscript submission systems — such as Editorial Manager and ScholarOne — that lets a corresponding author assign one or more of the 14 CRediT contributor roles to each author. That selection is not just cosmetic: it is designed to travel, unchanged, from the submission form into the article’s JATS XML and, increasingly, into the DOI metadata that Crossref exposes to the wider scholarly record.

    CRediT (Contributor Roles Taxonomy) is a standardised, machine-readable vocabulary of 14 contribution types — such as Conceptualization, Data curation or Writing – original draft — used to describe what each author or contributor actually did, distinct from the separate question of who qualifies for authorship. CASRAI originated the CRediT contributor role taxonomy in 2014. The standard is now stewarded by NISO as ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022, with descriptors available in multiple languages.

    This article is written for developers, editorial-systems teams and publishing operations staff who need to understand the full pipeline — not just what CRediT means, but how a checkbox selection becomes a permanent, queryable metadata field.

    What is the CRediT taxonomy form?

    The CRediT taxonomy form is the structured data-entry step, embedded in a journal’s manuscript submission system, where the corresponding author declares each contributor’s role from a fixed list of 14 options. It is a controlled-vocabulary form, not free text — every selection maps to one of the standard CRediT terms, each with its own stable identifier at credit.niso.org.

    The 14 roles captured by the form are:

    • Conceptualization
    • Data curation
    • Formal analysis
    • Funding acquisition
    • Investigation
    • Methodology
    • Project administration
    • Resources
    • Software
    • Supervision
    • Validation
    • Visualization
    • Writing – original draft
    • Writing – review & editing

    A contributor can hold more than one role, and a single role can be assigned to more than one contributor. Some submission systems also let authors record a degree of contribution — lead, equal or supporting — but this qualifier is optional and is not currently part of the CRediT standard itself; individual publishers decide whether to collect it.

    How manuscript systems capture the form at submission

    CRediT capture happens earliest in the pipeline, at manuscript submission, before peer review begins. Aries Systems’ Editorial Manager has supported CRediT since 2016 and Clarivate’s ScholarOne Manuscripts since 2018 — the two dominant commercial manuscript submission systems (MSSs) used across most major publishers. Open Journal Systems (OJS), the leading open-source platform, offers CRediT as a plugin.

    Manuscript system Vendor CRediT support since Integration type
    Editorial Manager Aries Systems 2016 Native checkbox form
    ScholarOne Manuscripts Clarivate 2018 Native checkbox form
    Open Journal Systems (OJS) Public Knowledge Project Community plugin Open-source plugin

    During submission, the corresponding author works through the contributor list and ticks the applicable CRediT roles for each name. The system typically requires this step to be completed, or at least reviewed, before the manuscript can proceed to the editor. Best practice — reflected in NISO’s implementation guidance — is for all named authors to review and confirm the roles assigned to them before the form is finalised, reducing later disputes over credit.

    How CRediT roles are encoded in JATS XML

    Once accepted, the article moves into production, where the checkbox selections are converted into JATS XML (Journal Article Tag Suite) — the NISO standard (ANSI/NISO Z39.96) used to structure scholarly article content and metadata for archiving, indexing and reuse. This is the step that turns a form selection into genuinely machine-readable data rather than just display text on the published page.

    The JATS4R (JATS for Reuse) working group, in a recommendation published 13 September 2021 and current at version 1.2, specifies exactly how CRediT terms must be tagged inside the <role> element within <contrib-group>/<contrib>. Under JATS 1.2 and above, each role carries four attributes:

    • @vocab — must always carry the value “credit”
    • @vocab-identifier — must point to https://credit.niso.org/
    • @vocab-term — must identify the specific CRediT term (e.g. “Conceptualization”)
    • @vocab-term-identifier — must point to the URL of that specific term (e.g. https://credit.niso.org/contributor-roles/conceptualization/)

    Each CRediT term requires its own <role> element — where a contributor holds multiple roles, the element is repeated rather than combined. JATS4R also provides a validator tool that flags mismatches, such as a role term with no corresponding @vocab="credit" attribute. Publishers still using the older JATS 1.1 DTD can tag CRediT terms using the @content-type attribute instead, though JATS4R recommends migrating to 1.2 for more robust support.

    How CRediT metadata reaches Crossref and the DOI record

    The final leg of the pipeline is deposit with Crossref, the DOI registration agency that most scholarly publishers use to register article identifiers and metadata. Per Crossref’s published strategy roadmap, Crossref is working on metadata ingest schema v.5.5 to add native support for the CRediT taxonomy of contributor roles — meaning the same structured role data captured in JATS XML can be deposited directly against the article’s DOI record.

    Once that ingest path is live, CRediT information becomes queryable through Crossref’s public APIs rather than sitting only inside a publisher’s own XML or HTML. That has knock-on value for research information systems, ORCID contribution records and institutional CRIS platforms, all of which can pull structured contribution data by DOI instead of scraping an “Author Contributions” paragraph from the rendered article page.

    Note that CRediT is explicitly not designed to determine authorship. ICMJE’s authorship criteria and COPE’s guidance on authorship disputes remain the governing frameworks for who qualifies as an author; CRediT — and the form that captures it — only describes what each named contributor did.

    Frequently asked questions

    What is the CRediT taxonomy?

    CRediT is a standardised system of 14 roles for describing individual contributions to a research output. When an author submits to a publisher using CRediT, the submission form asks them to select the applicable roles for each contributor, rather than relying on free-text acknowledgements.

    What are the 14 roles of the CRediT taxonomy?

    The 14 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 — each with a stable identifier at credit.niso.org.

    How do I CRediT someone in a research paper?

    Agree contributor roles with co-authors before submission, then use the journal’s CRediT taxonomy form to assign one or more of the 14 roles to each name. Where a journal has no integrated form, contributions can be listed manually in an author contribution statement or acknowledgement section.

    Implications for publishers and developers

    For manuscript-system developers, the practical requirement is straightforward but easy to get wrong: the checkbox output must map one-to-one onto the JATS4R attribute set, not a locally invented tag scheme, or the resulting XML will fail JATS4R validation and lose machine-readability further down the chain. For publishing operations teams, the Crossref v.5.5 schema update is the point at which CRediT stops being a publisher-side display feature and becomes part of the permanent scholarly record attached to the DOI itself.

    Institutions and funders tracking research contribution data — for hiring, promotion or grant-reporting purposes — should treat Crossref-deposited CRediT metadata, once available, as a more reliable source than scraping “Author Contributions” text from HTML pages, since the underlying <role> tagging is what the form was designed to produce in the first place.

    What happens next

    As Crossref’s schema v.5.5 rolls out, expect wider adoption of CRediT deposit among publishers that have not yet enabled it, and closer scrutiny from JATS4R’s validator tooling as more XML pipelines attempt to encode CRediT roles at scale. The direction of travel is consistent: from a checkbox on a submission form, through a standard XML attribute set, to a queryable field on a permanent DOI record. Developers building or auditing manuscript-system integrations should treat the CRediT taxonomy and its individual contributor roles as the canonical reference points, alongside the broader question of how contribution data relates to authorship criteria.