Add your co-authors, tick the 14 NISO standard roles each contributed to, and copy a journal-ready author contribution statement. Works for Nature, Cell, Science, PLOS, eLife, Elsevier, Wiley, and Taylor & Francis submissions.
A CRediT author statement is a standardised list of contribution roles, drawn from the 14-role NISO Z39.104-2022 taxonomy, that describes what each co-author did on a paper. It is required at submission by Nature Portfolio, Cell Press, Science, PLOS, eLife, Elsevier, Wiley, and Taylor & Francis.
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Get a Paper Visibility Audit →CRediT (Contributor Roles Taxonomy) is a standardised list of 14 roles that describe what each author contributed to a research paper. It was originally developed by a working group convened by Harvard University and the Wellcome Trust in 2012 and was approved as an ANSI/NISO standard (Z39.104-2022) in January 2022. The taxonomy is published under a Creative Commons CC-BY licence and is maintained by the National Information Standards Organization (NISO).
CRediT exists because a single line of authors at the top of a paper does not tell a reader who did what. Two papers with the same author list can represent very different divisions of labour. CRediT makes that division explicit, at the granularity reviewers and funders now expect.
The definitions below are quoted verbatim from the NISO CRediT role descriptors page. Hover the information icon next to each role in the tool above to see the same definition inline.
CRediT is now adopted across most of the major publishing portfolios. You will be asked for a CRediT-compliant statement on submission at:
The full adopter list is maintained on the NISO CRediT site. If a journal's submission system asks for an “author contribution statement” or “authorship statement”, CRediT is almost always the expected format.
Three rules separate a useful CRediT statement from a rote one.
1. Be honest about who did each thing. A senior PI who wrote the grant and supervised the postdoc who did the experiments should hold Conceptualization, Supervision, Funding acquisition, and Writing (review & editing), not Investigation or Formal analysis. Assigning roles you did not personally do is a form of gift authorship and is increasingly flagged by editors.
2. Do not assign every role to every author. Filling the grid is a red flag to reviewers. A typical five-author paper produces a statement where each author holds two to six roles, with the first and last authors holding the most. If every author holds every role, you have told the editor nothing useful.
3. Use degree of contribution when it adds information. Marking an author as lead on Writing (original draft) tells an editor something different from marking them as supporting. If two authors shared a role equally, mark both as equal, this is the CRediT-endorsed way to signal equal contribution without adding footnote symbols. Not every publisher asks for degree of contribution; Wiley, Elsevier, and Taylor & Francis commonly accept it, while Nature and Cell usually ask only for the role assignment.
Most journals accept either format. If the instructions for authors do not specify, the per-author format is the more common choice and tends to read more naturally.
The CRediT taxonomy does not change between a preprint and a journal version, but the question of when to attach a statement does.
Preprints (bioRxiv, medRxiv, arXiv, ChemRxiv, Research Square): none of the major preprint servers currently require a CRediT block at posting. Many authors still include one, either in the manuscript itself or in the “Author Contributions” field, because (a) it forces the co-author conversation to happen before submission, and (b) the same statement then flows into the journal version without rework. If you preprint first and plan to submit to a CRediT-adopter journal, drafting the statement at preprint time is the efficient path.
Corrections and corrigenda: when a paper is corrected, the CRediT statement attached to the original paper does not automatically transfer to the correction. If the correction itself has a specific author subset (say, only the two people who re-ran the contested analysis), journals usually expect a new CRediT block reflecting who did what on the correction, not on the original paper. This is explicit at PLOS and at Elsevier's correction workflow.
Revised versions after peer review: the statement should be updated if the revision changed who contributed. If a reviewer asked for a new experiment and a different lab member performed it, that person gains an Investigation role. Do not copy the v1 CRediT block into v2 unchanged if the work changed.
Degree of contribution is an optional extension supported by Wiley, Elsevier, and Taylor & Francis. Three rules separate a useful degree assignment from a pro-forma one.
If you are submitting to Nature, Cell, Science, PLOS, eLife, or BMJ, these journals do not use the lead/equal/supporting extension in their standard CRediT block. Leave the toggle off and the statement will read as plain role assignments.
This is the single most misassigned CRediT role. NISO defines Writing – original draft as “Preparation, creation and/or presentation of the published work, specifically writing the initial draft (including substantive translation).” The operative word is initial.
The role belongs to the people who produced the first written version of the manuscript. On a typical biomedical paper that is one or two authors, usually the first author and sometimes the senior author. It is not the role for a co-author who suggested wording changes, wrote a sidebar, or translated the text after a draft existed; those contributions belong in Writing (review & editing).
A useful test: if an author did not look at a blank document and start typing paragraphs of manuscript prose, they are not a Writing (original draft) contributor. They may well be a Writing (review & editing) contributor, which is equally legitimate and equally worth crediting.
A common question on first submission is whether CRediT replaces co-first-author markers, alphabetical listings, or shared-senior-author conventions. It does not, but it reduces the need for them.
Co-first authors (*): still used by most biomedical journals. CRediT does not override the author order. What CRediT does is make the basis for co-first status explicit: if both authors hold lead on Investigation, Formal analysis, and Writing (original draft), the asterisk is justified by the CRediT block itself. In fields moving away from typographic conventions (some economics journals, some CS venues), CRediT is now the primary signal.
Shared senior authors (‡): same principle. Two senior authors holding lead on Supervision, Funding acquisition, and Conceptualization justifies a shared-senior footnote via the CRediT block.
Alphabetical author lists (economics, mathematics, some theoretical physics): CRediT is particularly valuable here because the order carries no information. The contribution statement is the only machine-readable signal of who did what.
Corresponding author designation is separate from CRediT and is chosen independently.
Assigning Writing (review & editing) to everyone by default. The role is specifically for people who gave critical review or revision. A co-author who only read the manuscript and said “looks good” does not meet the bar. NISO's definition requires the contribution to be from “those from the original research group” performing “critical review, commentary or revision.”
Confusing Investigation with Methodology. Methodology is designing the approach. Investigation is executing it. The person who wrote the protocol for a new assay contributes to Methodology; the person who ran the assay contributes to Investigation. One paper can have both, and often does.
Using Resources when you mean Funding acquisition. Resources is the provision of materials (reagents, patient samples, instruments, compute). Funding acquisition is getting the money that paid for them. A senior author who wrote the grant held Funding acquisition; an external collaborator who supplied a mouse line held Resources.
Leaving Validation off the statement. If anyone in the team verified replication or reproducibility, either by re-running an experiment, cross-checking code output, or independently regenerating a figure from raw data, they held Validation. It is a real and distinct contribution that often goes uncredited.
Treating the statement as a post-submission afterthought. Discuss role assignments with all co-authors early in the writing process. Disagreements about who contributed what are easier to resolve before the manuscript is submitted than after it is in revision. A 2025 case report from the NIH describes using CRediT to resolve an authorship dispute; an early CRediT conversation would have prevented the dispute.
bioRxiv and medRxiv do not require CRediT at posting, but if your journal target requires it, you will save time by drafting the statement before you preprint. Some authors include the CRediT block in the preprint so it carries through to the journal version.
CRediT is a taxonomy for authors. Non-author contributions (technical help, sample donation, a piece of code from a collaborator who does not meet authorship criteria) belong in the Acknowledgements section, not the CRediT block.
Mark both as lead for that role with degree of contribution turned on. NISO allows multiple authors to hold the same role, and multiple authors to lead the same role.
Asterisks and daggers are typographic conventions for equal contribution. CRediT is a semantic description of what each person did. A journal can accept both. CRediT tends to give reviewers more usable information because it says what the equal contribution was, not just that there was one.
Not directly. But SciENcv and ORCID both support CRediT metadata on individual publications, and the persistent identifiers that NIH and NSF now require link to this information. A clean CRediT footprint across your papers is part of the broader “findability as a funding requirement” shift described in our related post.
Yes. The CRediT taxonomy is released under CC-BY. This tool quotes NISO's role definitions verbatim, attributes NISO as the source, and links to the primary source page. The tool itself is free to use without account or sign-up.