scope:

In a world where research is increasingly international, and where teamwork, collaboration and multidisciplinarity are required, it is important to understand how and where different individual contributions make a difference; being able to capture and describe those contributions easily and effectively is a key first step.

Specifically, the Contributor Roles Taxonomy's 14 roles and best practices represent a simple but comprehensive system that enables the the range and nature of contributions to scholarly published output to be captured in a transparent, consistent and structured format.

Purpose

Calls for a contributor roles taxonomy emerged following increasing dissatisfaction with established bibliographic conventions for describing and listing authors on scholarly outputs, which had become outdated, and increasingly, did not convey the diversity of contributions that researchers make to published output. The emergence of the 'impact agenda' for research, and the view that the published research article is perhaps the most important currency on which to judge the impact of an academic career, makes it fundamentally important not to rely on spurious indicators of a researcher's contributions - and using author position has been shown to be one such spurious and unreliable indicator.

Providing accessible contribution information about each specific contribution and contributor was seen as a way to address a range of well-described problems with author lists, among the most important, perhaps, to provide more accountability to prevent questionable, guest and 'ghost' authorship on research articles. Also, secondary drivers include providing a way to make sense of the increasing number of authors listed in research articles in many areas of science and providing visibility to early career researcher contributions where a 'first author' paper has proven to be elusive.

Furthermore, in fact, there are no consistent name ordering conventions from one field to the next. Alongside calls for a more responsible use of research-related metrics, and more holistic and tailored approaches to research and researcher assessment, as advocated by DORA³, it is also simply a good time to bring greater transparency to research. In a world where collaborative and open science is becoming the norm, the ability to provide visibility to a multitude of contributions is an important incentive for researchers contemplating a move into large team science. In addition, for the readers and users of research, being able to decipher the contributions, origins and context to what they are reading in a piece of scholarly published work are important determinants of how much - or how little - they might want to use, or even trust, the research being described.

There are many practical benefits of including more granularity about contributions to published scholarly output as a core component of metadata associated with a specific research output which enables computational research uses such as text and data mining and machine learning.

³ San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment