CASRAI Dictionary

Tag: research recognition

  • Recognising technicians and research-support staff: the Technician Commitment

    Walk into almost any laboratory, imaging suite, sequencing facility or data centre that produces research, and you will find people whose names rarely appear in the papers that result. Technicians keep instruments calibrated and running; facility managers maintain the shared equipment that whole departments depend on; data stewards organise and preserve the records that make analysis possible; and a wide range of research-support staff provide the specialist expertise without which the work would simply stop. Their contribution is foundational, and it is frequently invisible. The conventional reward systems of academia — authorship, citation, the publication record — were built around a narrower idea of who does research, and they often leave support staff out. This article looks at efforts to change that, drawing on the mentorship and career-stages domain of the CASRAI Dictionary.

    The recognition problem

    The problem is partly structural. Recognition in research has long been organised around the published article and its byline, and around metrics derived from it. Someone whose contribution is essential but does not fit the authorship mould — who built and maintained the instrument rather than designing the study, who curated the data rather than interpreting it, who ran a shared facility used by dozens of projects — can find that there is no obvious place for them in the formal record. The result is a career landscape in which support staff may be indispensable yet under-recognised: harder to promote on the basis of contribution, harder to retain when their work is invisible, and easy to overlook when funding and credit are distributed. This is not merely unfair to individuals; it weakens the research enterprise, because skilled technical staff who feel unrecognised are exactly the people research can least afford to lose.

    The Technician Commitment

    One of the most prominent responses is the Technician Commitment, an initiative through which research organisations pledge to address the visibility, recognition, career development and sustainability of their technical staff. The commitment is built around several themes. Visibility calls for ensuring technicians and their contributions are recognised within institutions and in research outputs. Recognition and career development addresses the need for clear progression routes, professional development and proper standing for technical roles. Sustainability concerns securing the future of the technical skills base on which research depends. By signing, organisations make public commitments and report on their progress, turning good intentions into accountable action. The Technician Commitment matters because it names the problem at an institutional level and asks employers, not just individuals, to do something about it.

    Making support contributions visible in outputs

    Institutional commitments matter, but recognition also has to reach into the outputs themselves, where so much credit is anchored. Several mechanisms help:

    • Contributorship statements. Moving from a bare author list to a structured statement of who did what creates room to name and describe contributions — technical and supporting work included — that a byline alone would hide.
    • Authorship where warranted. Where a technician’s contribution meets the criteria for authorship, including them as an author is the most direct form of recognition, and contribution-based thinking makes that case easier to see.
    • Crediting data and software work. When the data a facility produces, or the software a research engineer builds, is published as a citable output, the people responsible can be recognised as creators and contributors in its own right.
    • Specific acknowledgement. Where a contribution does not rise to authorship, a precise acknowledgement that states what someone did is far more meaningful than a generic line of thanks.

    How CRediT helps

    A contribution-based view of recognition depends on having a shared way to describe contributions, and this is where the CRediT taxonomy is particularly useful for support staff. Several of its roles map directly onto the work technicians and research-support staff do: Investigation for conducting experiments and operating instruments, Data curation for managing, annotating and maintaining data, Resources for providing materials, instruments and facilities, and Software for those who build the tools. The full set of roles is set out in our overview of the CRediT roles. By describing contributions in these terms, a contributorship statement can record exactly what a technician did, in the same structured vocabulary used for every other contributor — which means their work appears in the formal record as contribution, not as an afterthought. That parity of description is itself a form of recognition: it places technical work on the same footing as the work that has always been visible.

    Recognition across the career

    Recognition is not only about individual papers; it is about careers. Technical and support roles are genuine research careers with their own trajectories, and recognising them properly means attending to progression, development and standing over time — the concerns of the mentorship and career-stages domain. When contributions are visible in the record, they can inform promotion and reward; when career structures acknowledge technical expertise, skilled people are more likely to stay and develop. Visibility in outputs and visibility in careers reinforce one another.

    A consistent record of who contributes

    For the contributions of technicians and support staff to be recognised consistently — across institutions, publishers and reporting systems — the way those contributions are described must mean the same thing everywhere. That consistency is what the CASRAI Dictionary provides: a shared vocabulary so that the work of a technician, a data steward or a facility manager is understood and credited the same way wherever it is recorded. The Technician Commitment asks institutions to value the people who keep research running; a shared vocabulary for contribution helps ensure that value is reflected, honestly and visibly, in the record itself.

  • Crediting data stewards and curators: recognising RDM professionals

    Behind every well-managed research dataset there is usually a person whose name does not appear on the paper. They are the ones who organised the data so it made sense, wrote the documentation that explains what each variable means, checked it for errors, chose appropriate formats, ensured it was deposited under the right licence, and made it findable and reusable. This is the work of data stewards and curators — demanding, skilled professional labour that turns a heap of files into an asset that can be trusted and reused. Yet because it does not fit the traditional shape of authorship, it is frequently invisible in the scholarly record. This article makes the case for recognising it properly, drawing on the CRediT-extensions domain of the CASRAI Dictionary.

    The work behind FAIR data

    The aspiration that research data should be FAIR — Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable — is now widely shared, but it is easy to forget that FAIR data is not a natural state. Data does not become findable, well-documented and reusable on its own; someone has to make it so. Achieving each FAIR principle is real work: findability requires good metadata and persistent identifiers; interoperability requires standard formats and vocabularies; reusability requires thorough documentation, clear licensing and quality checking. This is precisely the work data stewards and curators do. They are, in effect, the people who deliver FAIR in practice, translating an admirable principle into actual datasets that other researchers can find and use. Recognising their contribution is therefore not a courtesy; it is acknowledging the people who make one of open science’s central goals achievable at all.

    The recognition gap

    The difficulty is that the reward systems of research were built around a narrower idea of contribution. Recognition has long been anchored in authorship of articles and the metrics derived from them, and someone whose contribution is curating the data rather than writing the paper can find there is no obvious place for them. They may have spent months making a dataset usable, only to be absent from the byline and, at most, thanked vaguely in an acknowledgement. This invisibility has consequences beyond unfairness. It makes data-management careers harder to sustain, because contribution that cannot be pointed to cannot easily support promotion; and it weakens the incentive to do the work well, because diligent curation goes unrewarded while the data that depends on it is taken for granted. A research system that wants FAIR data but does not recognise the people who produce it works against its own aims.

    The CRediT Data curation role

    One of the most direct ways to close this gap already exists within the standard vocabulary of contribution. The CRediT taxonomy includes a role that names this work explicitly: Data curation, defined as management activities to annotate (produce metadata), scrub data and maintain research data — including the software code where needed to interpret the data itself — for initial use and later reuse. That definition is almost a job description for a data steward. By assigning the Data curation role, a contributorship statement records the steward’s or curator’s work in the same structured form used for every other contributor, in the same place readers and evaluators look. The work appears in the formal record as a recognised contribution rather than disappearing into a line of thanks. The broader question of how contribution taxonomies are being adapted and extended for roles like these is the concern of the CRediT-extensions domain, and the principles of who counts as a contributor connect closely to authorship more generally.

    Beyond a single role

    It is worth being honest that a single role does not capture everything a data professional does. Their contribution often spans several activities, and a fair statement may reflect more than one:

    • Data curation for the core work of annotating, cleaning and maintaining the data.
    • Methodology where they helped design how data would be captured and structured.
    • Software where they built tools or scripts to process or document the data.
    • Validation where they verified the integrity and quality of the data and its outputs.

    The point is not to inflate credit but to describe contribution accurately. Data professionals are not a single undifferentiated category; using the appropriate roles, and more than one where warranted, gives a truthful picture of skilled, multifaceted work — which is what honest recognition requires.

    The professionalisation of research data management

    Recognition in individual outputs is part of a larger development: the professionalisation of research data management. Data stewardship is increasingly understood as a profession with its own expertise, training, standards and career structures, rather than a task done in spare moments by whoever is available. Dedicated data-steward and curator roles are appearing in institutions; training and competency frameworks for data professionals are maturing; and the field is acquiring the identity and standing that mark an established profession. This matters because recognition operates at two levels that reinforce each other. Crediting contributions in outputs makes individual work visible; building data management into a recognised profession makes it a viable career. Visible contributions strengthen the case for professional careers, and professional careers ensure there are skilled people to make the contributions. FAIR data depends on both being in place.

    A consistent vocabulary for data work

    For the contributions of data stewards and curators to be recognised consistently — across institutions, repositories, publishers and reporting systems — the way that work is described must mean the same thing everywhere. A Data curation role recorded in one system must be understood identically in another. That consistency is what the CASRAI Dictionary provides: a shared vocabulary so that the professional work of curating and stewarding data is understood and credited the same way wherever it appears. The recognition of data professionals is also a concern of research administration, where contributions, careers and the systems that record them come together. FAIR data is one of open science’s great ambitions; recognising the people who make data FAIR — in the record and in their careers — is how that ambition is sustained.

  • Reforming research culture: institutional change beyond the metrics debate

    Much of the conversation about responsible research assessment has, understandably, focused on metrics: the over-reliance on journal impact factors, the misuse of citation counts, the distorting effect of ranking people by where they publish rather than by what they contribute. These are real problems, and reforming how research is measured is genuinely important. But there is a risk in framing the whole challenge as a debate about metrics, because it can make the task look smaller than it is. Replacing one set of numbers with another, or adding a narrative section to an application form, does not by itself change the culture of research — the web of incentives, behaviours, relationships and rewards that actually shapes how people do their work. This article looks at the broader project of reforming research culture, drawing on the responsible assessment domain of the CASRAI Dictionary.

    Why culture, not just metrics

    Research culture is the environment in which research happens: how people are hired, promoted and rewarded; whether collaboration, mentorship and openness are valued or merely tolerated; whether the pressure to produce flashy results crowds out the slow, careful, reproducible work that good science depends on. Metrics are part of this culture, but only part. A system can adopt enlightened assessment criteria on paper while still, in practice, rewarding the same narrow behaviours, because the underlying incentives, expectations and norms have not shifted. Genuine reform means attending to the whole environment, not just the measurement layer on top of it. The metrics debate is the visible tip; the culture is the larger mass beneath.

    Wellcome and the research-culture agenda

    One of the organisations that has done most to widen this conversation is Wellcome, whose work on research culture has drawn attention to the lived experience of researchers and the pressures that shape it. Wellcome’s research-culture programme has highlighted that the environment in which research is conducted — the competitiveness, the precarity of careers, the toll on wellbeing — is itself a determinant of research quality and integrity. The insight is that you cannot reliably get good, honest, careful research out of a culture that rewards the opposite. By framing research culture as worthy of serious attention in its own right, this work has moved the conversation beyond the technicalities of assessment towards the human realities that assessment exists to serve.

    The Hong Kong Principles

    If the goal is to reward the behaviours that make research trustworthy, then assessment needs to be aligned with research integrity — and this is precisely what the Hong Kong Principles for assessing researchers set out to do. The Hong Kong Principles propose that researchers should be assessed in ways that recognise and reward trustworthy research practices: responsible research conduct, transparent reporting that includes the full record rather than only positive results, open science, a diversity of contributions and roles, and the activities that build and sustain the research community. Their distinctive contribution is to connect assessment directly to integrity: instead of asking only “how productive or highly cited is this researcher?”, they ask “does this researcher do their work in a trustworthy, open and responsible way?” This reframes assessment as a lever for better behaviour, not merely a measurement exercise — if institutions reward the practices that make research reliable, they get more of them.

    CoARA and institutional commitment

    Principles need vehicles for action, and one of the most significant is the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA). CoARA brings together organisations that commit to reforming research assessment, and crucially it asks them to make concrete commitments and to develop action plans for change within their own institutions. This institutional dimension is what distinguishes durable reform from good intentions. It is one thing for an individual to believe assessment should be broader and more responsible; it is another for a university or funder to commit publicly, develop a plan, and hold itself accountable for changing its own practices. By moving reform from the level of individual conviction to the level of institutional commitment, CoARA helps ensure that cultural change is embedded in how organisations actually operate, rather than remaining an aspiration that never reaches the committee rooms where decisions are made.

    Recognising diverse contributions and reproducible work

    A recurring theme across all of these efforts is the recognition of a broader range of contributions and the valuing of careful, reproducible practice. Several strands matter:

    • Diverse contributions. Research depends on far more than first-author papers — on data and software, on mentorship, on peer review, on technical and supporting work, on building shared resources. A reformed culture finds ways to recognise these.
    • Reproducibility. Valuing rigorous, transparent, reproducible work — rather than only novel or eye-catching results — is central to a healthier culture, because reproducibility is the foundation of reliable knowledge.
    • Openness. Rewarding open practices — open data, open methods, open access — aligns incentives with the kind of transparent research the community says it wants.

    From assessment to culture, and back

    Assessment and culture are bound together. How we assess researchers signals what we value, and what we value shapes how people behave. The structured description of contributions plays a role here: when a person’s full range of contributions can be recorded and recognised — through frameworks such as the CRediT taxonomy and its set of contribution roles — it becomes possible to value more than the narrow signals that metrics capture. But the description is a means, not an end. The end is a research culture in which good, honest, open, careful, collaborative work is genuinely rewarded, and in which the people who do it can build sustainable careers.

    A shared vocabulary for a shared reform

    Reforming culture across many institutions requires a common language for what is being recognised and valued. Contribution types, assessment criteria and the elements of a researcher’s record must be described consistently, or reform in one place cannot be understood or built upon elsewhere. That consistency is what the CASRAI Dictionary supports: a shared vocabulary for describing the contributions and activities that a reformed culture seeks to reward. The metrics debate opened the door; the larger work — the one Wellcome, the Hong Kong Principles and CoARA are pursuing — is changing the culture the metrics were only ever a symptom of.