The CRediT taxonomy of authors roles, available at https://www.casrai.org/credit.html#, is a well-known reference, when it comes to the definition of the contribution that each author of a paper can possibly bring to the development of the paper. This taxonomy sports 14 different types of contribution.

The difficult aspect we found, in trying using the CrediT taxonomy, is its quite extensive and all-cases covering nature. When reporting the different contributions to a paper we found this taking too much of space in the paper, without resulting in an effective (in our humble opinion) added value.

An example could be (here [X] is a reference to the CRediT url or to one of the papers that turned into the CRediT taxonomy; authors are represented by initials, as usual): Contributions, based on [X]: conceptualization DC, data curation SF, formal analysis DC + MV, funding acquisition DGS, investigation DC + MV, methodology DC + ALB, project administration ALB + DGS, resources DC + ALB + DGS, software DC, supervision DGS, validation DC + SF, visualization DC + MV, writing – original draft DC + MV + SF, writing – review & editing DC + ALB + MV + SF + DGS.

We felt this way the declaration of contribution to be too long w.r.t. the value conveyed, and decided a better compromise could be in a reduced amount of types. In particular, we went from the 14 entries of the CRediT taxonomy to 6 entries.

Given the description of each role in the CrediT taxonomy, we propose to:

1. group Conceptualization, and Methodology into conceptualization;
2. leave data curation alone;
3. group Formal analysis, and Software, and Investigation, and Validation into development;
4. group Funding acquisition, and Project administration, ​and ​Resources, and ​Supervision into supervision;
5. shorten Writing – original draft ​into drafting;
6. group Visualization, and Writing – review & editing into reviewing;

With such mapping the definition of contributions could reduce from (here [X] is a reference to the url of the CRediT taxonomy):

Contributions, based on [X]: conceptualization DC, data curation SF, formal analysis DC + MV, funding acquisition DGS, investigation DC + MV, methodology DC + ALB, project administration ALB + DGS, resources DC + ALB + DGS, software DC, supervision DGS, validation DC + SF, visualization DC + MV, writing – original draft DC + MV + SF, writing – review & editing DC + ALB + MV + SF + DGS.

to (here [Y] being a reference to the url of this page):

Contributions, based on [Y]: conceptualization DC, development DC, data curation SF, drafting DC + MV + SF, revising all authors, supervision ALB + DGS.