R0029/2026-03-27/Q001/SRC04/E01¶
CRediT taxonomy: 14 contributor roles, no AI-specific provisions
URL: https://credit.niso.org/
Extract¶
CRediT (Contributor Roles Taxonomy) is a community-owned taxonomy of 14 contributor roles, now an ANSI/NISO standard (Z39.104-2022). The 14 roles are: Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Funding acquisition, Investigation, Methodology, Project administration, Resources, Software, Supervision, Validation, Visualization, Writing — original draft, Writing — review & editing.
CRediT is used by over 120 journals and is the closest existing standard to structured contribution attribution. However, it was designed for human contributors and does not include any AI-specific roles or provisions. A 2026 paper in Learned Publishing discusses "Enhancing, Understanding and Adoption" of CRediT but the taxonomy has not been formally extended to accommodate AI contributions.
Both the IBM AI Attribution Toolkit and the AIA icon system cite CRediT as an inspiration, but neither is a formal extension of CRediT itself.
Relevance to Hypotheses¶
| Hypothesis | Relationship | Strength |
|---|---|---|
| H1 | N/A | CRediT exists as a standard but does not address AI — neither supports nor contradicts the claim that AI-specific frameworks exist |
| H2 | N/A | CRediT's existence shows structured attribution is possible, but its lack of AI coverage is not evidence that only binary disclosure exists |
| H3 | Supports | The gap between CRediT (established, human-only) and AI attribution proposals (emerging, not standardized) confirms the pre-standardization state |
Context¶
CRediT's success demonstrates that structured contribution attribution can achieve broad adoption. Its absence of AI provisions represents both a gap and an opportunity — several proposals explicitly reference CRediT as a model.