Role Use, Intellectual Structure Evolu-tion, and the Co-occurrence Topic Net-work of Vocabulary: The Domain of Role Classifications and Ontologies of Participants

Document Type : Research Paper

Authors

1 Assistant Professor, Department of Information Science, Faculty of Education and Psychology, Alzahra University, Tehran, Iran

2 Assistant Professor, Department of Preventive Medicine, Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, Chicago, IL, USA.

3 Ph.D. Student of Information Science and Knowledge Studies, Department of Information Science, Faculty of Education and Psychology, Alzahra University, Tehran, Iran

Abstract

Purpose: Contributor Role Taxonomy (CRediT) offers a standardized set of 14 roles—including conceptualization, methodology, software, validation, formal analysis, investigation, resources, data curation, writing (original draft), writing (review and editing), visualization, supervision, project administration, and funding acquisition—to specify contributions to scholarly publications. This study aimed to analyze the evolution of the intellectual structure, the maturity of thematic clusters, and the co-occurrence network of words related to contributor role ontologies and taxonomies within the Web of Science (WoS) database. The co-occurrence network of keywords and thematic clusters in the WoS database was visualized and analyzed to highlight thematic clusters in this context. Moreover, the study aimed to analyze the maturity of thematic clusters through a topic map and examine their evolution using a Sankey diagram.
Methodology: This study employed a literature review with a descriptive approach to provide a conceptual analysis of scholarly authorship and CRediT. This study utilized the co-occurrence word analysis technique, combined with a scientometric approach, was utilized. VOSviewer software, which applies smart local moving algorithms to identify topic clusters, was used for network mapping and analysis. The co-word analysis method was used to identify thematic clusters related to contributor role ontology and taxonomy and to map co-occurrence networks. The research included all keywords extracted from documents indexed in English in the Web of Science (WoS) database from 1985 to 2024. A database search using prominent words and phrases retrieved 2,126 documents. Additionally, R and BiblioShiny (the web-based interface of the Bibliometrix library) were utilized to generate visual maps. The strategic diagram (topic map) and Sankey diagram (topic evolution) were used to assess the maturity and development of the clusters.
Findings: Keyword clustering in the WoS database resulted in six distinct clusters: ‘bibliometric analysis in research authorship,’ ‘natural language processing and deep learning in authorship attribution,’ ‘authorship identification techniques via stylometry,’ ‘linguistic approaches to contributor role ontology,’ ‘data mining techniques for authorship role analysis,’ and ‘machine learning techniques for author attribution.’ The timeline overlay visualization of the WoS network revealed that between 2014 and 2020, the significance of keywords in this field increased notably. Additionally, 2020 held greater weight and importance within the network, encompassing the most relevant and prominent keywords, which highlights that the discourse surrounding contributor role ontologies and taxonomies has matured. The density visualization indicated that the terms ‘authorship attribution’ and ‘machine learning’ exhibited the highest density in this network, suggesting that machine learning techniques are widely employed to identify authorship and contributions. Various machine learning methods, data mining, deep learning, natural language processing, and linguistic approaches are utilized to evaluate research contributions. The findings from the Sankey diagram showed that between 2019 and 2024, four themes— ‘authorship,’ ‘attribution of authorship,’ ‘history,’ and ‘ontology of the contributory role’—persist. This continuity in related subjects implies that these concepts remain equally important in ongoing debates, with researchers conducting deeper and more advanced investigations in these areas.
Conclusion: Utilizing CRediT and adhering to ethical principles such as transparency, honesty, and integrity enhances the evaluation of researchers' contributions to scholarly work. It also increases individuals’ visibility in professional environments and supports researchers when applying for job opportunities. The results of this study indicate that, when seeking to improve recognition of scholarly contributions, the research community should look beyond traditional authorship issues and focus on developing a collaborative approach that preserves the rights and responsibilities of all contributors. Clearly describing the roles and contributions of both author and non-author contributors promotes ethical collaboration and encourages interdisciplinary partnerships. Although CRediT was initially developed for the health and biological sciences, it has since been adopted in other fields as well. This expansion highlights a growing interest across scholarly domains in improving recognition of contributions, which necessitates a closer examination of the tasks involved in various domains. Conducting quantitative and qualitative studies to determine which roles are most prominent in different fields would be a valuable direction for future research. Finally, our results emphasize the need to localize and integrate existing tools or develop context-specific solutions to enhance Iranian scholarly journals' management of information about scholarly contributions. This would enable researchers to register the roles and contributions of collaborators more quickly and easily when submitting manuscripts. Therefore, we suggest that administrators and digital developers of scholarly journals consider incorporating either the English version of CRediT roles or their translated equivalents into their infrastructure. In this regard, the results of this study can be seen as useful recommendations for the Publications Commission of the Iranian Ministry of Science, Research, and Technology, as well as the Ministry of Health and Medical Education. Developing policies and directives for editors of scholarly journals—published in both Persian and English—and mandating the use of contributor roles will facilitate the documentation of individual contributions during the submission process.

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References

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