University Publications Policy

CRediT (Contributor Roles Taxonomy) is a system that clearly defines the roles and contributions of each person involved in a research project. 

Its standardised taxonomy includes 14 roles that cover the range of typical contributions that someone could make to a piece of research. Individual authors can have multiple roles, and not all roles will apply to every research output. 

The CRediT roles, along with a simple explanation, are: 

• Conceptualisation: developing the research idea, hypothesis or goals. 
• Data curation: managing and organising the data. 
• Formal analysis: statistical, computational or mathematical analysis of the data. 
• Funding acquisition: securing the funding for the research. 
• Investigation: conducting a research and investigation process, specifically performing the experiments or data/evidence collection. 
• Methodology: developing or designing the methods and procedures for the research; including creation of models. 
• Project administration: the administrative tasks related to the study, including managing budgets and timelines and co-ordinating activity. 
• Resources: provision of study materials, reagents, materials, patients, laboratory samples, animals, instrumentation, computing resources or other analysis tools. 
• Software: developing, coding, designing or testing software used in the research. 
• Supervision: oversight and leadership for the research activity planning and execution, including mentorship external to the core team. 
• Validation: checking the accuracy, reliability or reproducibility of the methods or results. 
• Visualisation: creating visualisations or other graphical representations of the data. 
• Writing – original draft: writing and developing the initial draft of the research output (including substantive translation). 
• Writing – review and editing: revision and editing of the research output. 

The complete definitions of the roles are available on the CRediT website. 

The benefits of using CRediT

The CRediT taxonomy is helpful in the following ways:

• Clarity and transparency: it provides a clear and detailed account of each contributor’s role, making it easier to understand who did what in a research project. 
• Recognition: it ensures that all contributors receive appropriate credit for their work, which can be important for career advancement. 
• Reducing disputes: by clearly defining roles, it helps to reduce conflicts and misunderstandings about authorship and contributions. 
• Facilitating collaboration: it makes it easier for researchers to collaborate by clearly outlining responsibilities and contributions.

The University of Leeds Publications Policy requires that all research outputs must include author contributions so that each individual is duly recognised for their identified roles during the research project. Using the CRediT taxonomy meets this requirement. 

The taxonomy also supports the University’s Research Culture Strategic Objective 1: Valuing diverse forms of research activity. Specifically, it can ensure that everyone is appropriately recognised, rewarded and valued for their contributions.  

Give CRediT when publishing

The CRediT taxonomy is used by many journals and publishers to provide a more comprehensive and transparent approach to authorship. 

When you submit an article to a journal with a publisher who has adopted CRediT, you select and provide the role(s) in the CRediT taxonomy for each author who participated in the research.  

If you submit to a journal that does not use CRediT, you can use the roles to help structure your free text acknowledgements section.  

Authors can have more than one role. All roles do not need to be used.  

How to add CRediT details to Sympletic 

You can include CRediT roles when you create a record for your research output in Symplectic.   

For more information on how to do this, please see the quick guide to adding creative and contributor author roles in the Symplectic help area. You will need to log into Symplectic to access it.