Using CRediT to promote responsible research

Abstract

Research culture is a complex concept, which includes the way we evaluate, support and reward quality in research and how we recognise varied contributions to a research activity. In 2023, the University of Edinburgh launched a Research Cultures Delivery Plan, which includes as an action point to promote guidance on authorship and acknowledgement in outputs and the adoption of a University-wide Fair Publication Policy. The acknowledgement of contributors is an essential part of responsible research and adopting the Contributor Roles Taxonomy (CRediT), which consists of 14 roles that describe each contributor’s specific contribution to the scholarly output, supports the implementation of the Fair Publication Policy and the embedding of responsible research at the University.

The CRediT roles are not intended to define what constitutes authorship, but to capture all the work that allows scholarly publications to be produced. Using the taxonomy also brings a number of additional practical benefits to the research environment, including:

• Enable visibility and recognition of the different contributions of researchers, particularly in multi-authored works – across all aspects of the research being reported (including data curation, statistical analysis, etc.)
• Enable new indicators of research value, use and re-use, credit and attribution​.