CRediT Taxonomy

The CRediT Taxonomy (Contributor Roles Taxonomy) constitutes a standardized controlled vocabulary, comprising a finite set of 14 roles, designed to provide granularity and transparency in describing contributor contributions to scientific publications. Its implementation aims to overcome the limitations of binary authorship statements by providing a robust classificatory framework that maps inherent research cycle activities, from "Conceptualization" and "Methodology" to "Formal Analysis" and the stages of "Writing – Original Draft" and "Writing – Review & Editing". This standardization facilitates data interoperability and machine-readable metadata processing, essential for scientific information systems and repository management.

The journal's adoption of the CRediT Taxonomy represents an institutional commitment to best practices in scientific integrity and editorial ethics. By requiring authors to categorize their participation according to CRediT roles, it promotes fair and accurate attribution of intellectual credit. This procedure mitigates the risk of ghost authorship, honorary authorship, and authorship disputes, which are critical elements in maintaining trust in the publication system. Furthermore, the explicit description of individual contributions through the CRediT taxonomy not only supports recognition mechanisms (such as research grants and career evaluations) but also provides readers with unambiguous clarity about each researcher's responsibilities and expertise in the published article, reinforcing the validity and traceability of the presented results.

Contributor Roles Definition

Conceptualization – Formulation or evolution of overarching research goals and aims.
Data Curation – Management activities to annotate (produce metadata), scrub data and maintain research data (including software code, where necessary for interpreting the data itself) for initial use and later re-use.
Formal Analysis – Application of statistical, mathematical, computational, or other formal techniques to analyze or synthesize study data.
Funding Acquisition – Acquisition of financial support for the project leading to this publication.
Investigation – Conducting a research and investigation process, specifically performing experiments, or data/evidence collection.
Methodology – Development or design of methodology; creation of models.
Project Administration – Management and coordination responsibility for research activity planning and execution.
Resources – Provision of study materials, reagents, materials, patients, laboratory samples, animals, instrumentation, computing resources, or other analysis tools.
Software – Programming, software development; designing computer programs; implementation of computer code and supporting algorithms; testing of existing code components.
Supervision – Oversight and leadership responsibility for research activity planning and execution, including mentorship external to the core team.
Validation – Verification, whether as part of the activity or separate, of overall replication/reproducibility of results/experiments and other research outputs.
Visualization – Preparation, creation and/or presentation of the published work, specifically visualization/data presentation.
Writing – Original Draft – Preparation, creation and/or presentation of the published work, specifically writing the initial draft (including substantive translation).
Writing – Review & Editing – Preparation, creation and/or presentation of the published work by members of the original research group, specifically critical review, commentary or revision – including pre- or post-publication stages.

At the end of the article, authors are required to specify individual contributions for each coauthor using the "Author Contributions" section.