Talk:Contributor Roles Taxonomy

Following the initial rejection of the submission, I have added several more independent and published references. To address the neutral point of view criterion, I have added more limitations and criticisms, and rephrased a number of aspects.Aoholcombe (talk) 02:48, 11 August 2024 (UTC)

About conflicts of interest

I wrote the first draft, so regarding perceived conflicts of interest, I am an academic who is a published advocate of using CRediT, although I receive no financial benefits from its use and do not have any related paid positions. I have avoided citing my own articles on the topic, but I have linked to a project I help lead that has translated CRediT. Aoholcombe (talk) 11:44, 9 August 2024 (UTC)

Thanks for putting this together!

I'm just going to note some things here I might add/change, but will only get around to this later.

Header: bold first CRediT. Add bit about "Author Contributions" sections appearing in journals. Was this really only start in the 2000s? Was it started by Nature? I'm not aware of the history at present, but I wouldn't name-drop Nature unless they were the genuine 1st, and I might elaborate more here. There was a development of ideas between Drummond Rennie and the CRediT taxonomy that is missing. I'd also note something like "today __% of scientific journals include the CRediT taxonomy in their standard reporting forms." That would help to clarify to the reader the relative importance of CRediT more broadly in terms of uptake. I might use more specific dates in the intro also...

Intro: might be nice to have the intro more succinct, and then the listing of categories under a separate section header.

Categories: "possible" benefits is odd phrasing for a Wiki. I'd move this bit to its own subsection somehow. Presently it's presented as equal information with the categories themselves, despite not even being confident that the things its saying are objectively true(?).

History: did Drummond Rennie emerge out of a vacuum? Genuine question. I have to imagine these conversations were had before Rennie, even if their paper was a landmark reckoning for the concept. If there's any ability to bring this backward in time a bit and acknowledge a broader understanding of author credit before people started grumbling... for instance author order in many fields tacitly implies order of importance, with researcher status (ex: PhD, supervisor) indicating when the "middle author" zone ends and "cosupervisor, lead supervisor" zone begins. So we've long had concepts of awarding credit to authors based on their contribution to the work, we just hadn't formalised it as concisely as a structured metadata entry would. There could also be a bit of a note on how total authors per paper has increased dramatically in the internet era, not just because of interconnectivity and collaborative opportunities, but because this also coincided with major acheivements of biotechnology that resulted in more disparate specialities collaborating (e.g. wet lab and bioinformatics biologists regularly collaborating to do two halves of a paper concept). In the pre-1990s, author lists were much shorter, and in no small part because work was genuinely done more independently. So CRediT and the notion of a "need" for more structured author contributions wasn't just something we were all naive about for centuries. It emerged alongside a growing realisation the old system of authorship/contribution acknowledgement wasn't sufficient for the modern era of publishing.

Limitations/Criticisms: I think the major limitation is really the 3rd one (ICMJE), and this should come first within the section. Putting it 3rd is burying the lede a bit. The current 1st (the discussion of the psychology study) is an extension of the ICMJE comment in action: a box ticked doesn't indicate the quality or quantity of that box-ticking.

I'd have to see if there's really a proper hubbub online in independent sources... I might/might not add a minor criticism that CRediT is being implemented alongside a number of initiatives that require authors to do yet more work to get published alongside, e.g., data management and sharing in repositories, ensuring authors meet Open Access institutional requirements (using Green institutional repositories if needed), Preregistration, etc... CRediT is so minor in this grand scheme, it's not a personal view that it's an issue. Most of those are also very good things overall, even if it foists more work onto authors.

But I think where the genuine criticism might come in is that, in this sea of asking authors to do more and more administrative work at the final hurdle, they can be lazier about box-ticking exercises. Do authors really think deeply about what it means to tick a box that says "Investigation"? Or do they just go through and in 1-2 minutes go "yeah, yeah, yeah, no, yeah, no, no, done. Great. I can finally submit!" Maybe I'm injecting too much of a personal view here, so I'd be curious if there's a broader conversation around this evidenced in meaningful independent sources.

That all said, great to have a CRediT wiki page! Definitely a worthwhile addition. Crawdaunt (talk) 07:05, 4 September 2024 (UTC)