[8] Researchers submitting an article for publication to a journal using CRediT are typically asked to tick a box next to each of the fourteen contribution types associated with the work that they did.
Citing inadequacies with current practices in listing authors of papers in medical research journals, Drummond Rennie and co-authors, writing in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) in 1997, called for:a radical conceptual and systematic change, to reflect the realities of multiple authorship and to buttress accountability.
In 2012, a draft taxonomy was created at a workshop held at Harvard involving biomedical scientists, publishers, and research funders.
[13][14] Beginning in 2014, a working group of publishers, funders, and university representatives began meeting to refine the draft of the CRediT taxonomy, coordinated by the Consortia for Advancing Standards in Research Administration Information (CASRAI).
[23] In 2023, a systematic scoping review identified 20 unique ethical issues related to contributor role taxonomies like CRediT.
[27] CrossRef, which is the largest maintainer of metadata about scientific articles, does not currently support import of CRediT information, but this feature is in development.