# Transparent Attribution of Contributions to Research: Aligning Guidelines to Real-Life Practices
## 4 The Contributor Roles Taxonomy: Promises and Pitfalls
It \"includes, but is not limited to, traditional authorship roles\", \"capture[s] all the work that allows scholarly publications to be produced\", and can be applied to contributors \"named in acknowledgements\" ([[https://casrai.org/credit/](https://casrai.org/credit/)]([https://casrai.org/credit/](https://casrai.org/credit/)) and [6]). These claims do not seem to be entirely true, as explained below. First, as implemented in Editorial Manager, CRediT is only applicable to byline authors; none of the roles can be assigned to acknowledgees (i.e., contributors named in the Acknowledgments). Moreover, CRediT ignores at least three types of non-author contributors (Table 1) and induces named authors to attribute these roles to themselves, thus creating the potential for contradictory or misleading information to be passed on to readers and research evaluators. Figure 1: Example of CRediT roles presented by taxa at the end of an article (DOI: 10.3390/publications6040046). Top, extract of page 1; bottom, extract of page 10 with taxa in the “Author Contributions” section (red bar). One non-author role that, in CRediT, is difficult if not impossible to attribute transparently and accurately is technical support. CRediT enables authors to claim credit for the roles of \"Resources\" (e.g., obtaining samples, providing animals or patients), \"Investigation\" (e.g., performing experiments), and \"Formal analysis\" (e.g., statistical analysis). Yet it does not permit authors (i.e., contributors named in the byline) to attribute these roles to non-author contributors, who may have done most or all of the technical work (e.g., handling resources, doing experiments, and analyzing data). According to the ICMJE criteria, \"substantial contributions to... acquisition... of data\" (i.e., experimentation) are insufficient for authorship if not accompanied by involvement in writing the manuscript, approving it and agreeing to be accountable for it [56]. This potentially confusing situation is illustrated by the often-cited example of the fictitious Dr. [PERSON], a neurologist who did 500 hours of clinical work for a study but only merited acknowledgment [57]. In the CRediT system, authors in a similar case would be able to claim credit for the roles of \"Resources\" (recruiting patients) and \"Investigation\" (examining patients) even if they made small contributions to these tasks, but to readers it would appear as if they alone had done this work. A similar situation arises when independent statistical analysis is used: CRediT will either fail to identify any author as responsible for this task, or will attribute \"Formal analysis\" to authors who may (or may not) have handled any statistical calculations--albeit not the type of full analysis likely to be outsourced to an expert. In these cases also, CRediT may fail to accurately identify the persons who did the actual work. A second problematic feature of CRediT involves two taxa that relate to the text of research reports. One is \"Writing--original draft\", defined as \"Preparation, creation and/or presentation of the published work, specifically writing the initial draft (including substantive translation)\". The term \"substantive translation\" is not defined in translation reference books (e.g., [58; 59; 60]), although it has appeared sporadically, with variable meanings, in scholarly texts. The definition of this taxon is therefore not easy to apprehend, and in fact evinces a lack of understanding of translation, because translation always requires a source text and therefore cannot be considered part of the process of writing the