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A ten-year drive to credit authors for their work — and why there’s still more to do

Information about the roles of each author of a paper can help to build trust, integrity and responsible research assessment. Coordinated efforts are needed to consolidate progress.
By
  1. Liz Allen

    1. Liz Allen is associate director at Research Consulting, Nottingham, UK.

  2. Veronique Kiermer

    1. Veronique Kiermer is chief scientific officer at PLOS, San Francisco, California, USA.

  3. Simon Porter

    1. Simon Porter is vice-president of research futures at Digital Science, London, UK.

  4. Ruth Whittam

    1. Ruth Whittam is a data scientist at Digital Science, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.

A stylised illustration of a big group of scientists bustling around in a busy and chaotic office environment. They are working on various tasks like artwork, carrying paperwork, writing and editing on computers. They all have different coloured sticky notes on their backs and arms labelled with the tasks they are responsible for.

Illustration: David Parkins

A decade ago, we and others launched a tool for clarifying the roles of each author of a research paper. The Contributor Role Taxonomy (CRediT) includes 14 types of contribution, from conceptualization to software and data curation. It was designed to prevent questionable authorship practices and make it easier for researchers to demonstrate the diversity of their contributions to science, among other benefits.

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Nature 648, 33-34 (2025)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-025-03860-5

Updates & Corrections

  • Correction 26 November 2025: An earlier version of this Comment neglected to specify that the proportion of 22% referred only to Dimensions articles for which full text was available.

References

  1. Allen, L., Kiermer, V., Porter, S. & Whittam, R. Preprint at MetaArXiv https://doi.org/10.31222/osf.io/hfbkp_v1 (2025).

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Competing Interests

L.A. and V.K. were involved in the initial inception and development of the CRediT taxonomy. They now co-chair the NISO Standing Committee on CRediT.

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