# Transparent Attribution of Contributions to Research: Aligning Guidelines to Real-Life Practices
## 4 The Contributor Roles Taxonomy: Promises and Pitfalls  
In the context of differing authorship and contributorship practices across disciplines, Harvard University and Wellcome Trust organized an invitation-only meeting in 2012 to look for ways to standardize attribution, especially by harnessing the semantic abilities of the web [48]. One goal was to enable automatic tracking of contributions, to facilitate analyses of different roles in research and ultimately support promotion and funding decisions. A working group was formed to develop a standardized taxonomy of \"roles and contributions in scholarly publications\", and their preliminary efforts were based on text analyses of the Author Contributions and Acknowledgments sections in mostly biomedical research articles. The outcome of these consultations was the Contributor Roles Taxonomy (CRediT), which establishes 14 taxa (terms and short definitions) [49]. It was assessed in a survey of life science researchers and reportedly received positive feedback [49], but the survey data were not provided. The revised version [6] comprises the following \"roles\": conceptualization, methodology, software, validation, formal analysis, investigation, resources, data curation, writing--original draft, writing--review and editing, visualization, supervision, project administration, and funding acquisition. Although CRediT has not yet been formally tested for accuracy or validity, it has been implemented or endorsed by several well-known actors in the research publishing community. For example, it has been integrated into Editorial Manager ([[https://www.ariessys.com/wp-content/uploads/CRediT-FAQ_8.5x11.pdf](https://www.ariessys.com/wp-content/uploads/CRediT-FAQ_8.5x11.pdf)]([https://www.ariessys.com/wp-content/uploads/CRediT-FAQ_8.5x11.pdf](https://www.ariessys.com/wp-content/uploads/CRediT-FAQ_8.5x11.pdf))), a manuscript submission software for journals produced by Aries Systems. In August 2018, this software house was acquired by Elsevier [50], making this publisher the de facto owner of CRediT. Currently, Aries software is used by Elsevier and other publishers such as Wiley, Taylor&Francis, Wolters Kluwer, and Springer Nature ([[https://www.ariessys.com/software/editorial-manager/](https://www.ariessys.com/software/editorial-manager/)]([https://www.ariessys.com/software/editorial-manager/](https://www.ariessys.com/software/editorial-manager/))), so CRediT is now optionally available to over 10,600 academic journals [51] (p. 41) in a broad range of disciplines. In addition, CRediT is implemented in ReView software ([[http://rivervalleytechnologies.com/review-intuitive-and-powerful-peer-review/](http://rivervalleytechnologies.com/review-intuitive-and-powerful-peer-review/)]([http://rivervalleytechnologies.com/review-intuitive-and-powerful-peer-review/](http://rivervalleytechnologies.com/review-intuitive-and-powerful-peer-review/))). By late 2018, about 120 journals and publishing platforms had adopted CRediT [52]. At the time of writing, CRediT had been endorsed by the US National Academy of Sciences [53] and _Science_[54]. Some journals publish CRediT roles in their articles (Figure 1, Figure S1). Other journals collect CRediT data without publishing them, and still others have chosen not to use CRediT([[http://www.nasonline.org/about-nas/Transparency_Author_Contributions.html](http://www.nasonline.org/about-nas/Transparency_Author_Contributions.html)]([http://www.nasonline.org/about-nas/Transparency_Author_Contributions.html](http://www.nasonline.org/about-nas/Transparency_Author_Contributions.html))). Use by authors can be obligatory or optional, but authors tend to avoid it when it is voluntary [55]. The producers of CRediT claim it \"describes the typical range of 'contributions' to scholarly published output for biomedical and science (sic) more broadly [and is] practical and easy to understand while minimizing the potential for misuse\" ([[https://casrai.org/credit/](https://casrai.org/credit/)]([https://casrai.org/credit/](https://casrai.org/credit/))).