Attribute Contents: The @contrib-type attribute was designed to name the role of the contributor and was also designed to accept any text as its value. Values may be from a controlled vocabulary such as CRediT (“Data Curation”), natural language words such as such as “author” or “deep sea diver”, or terms also used for the @person-group-type attributes (“allauthors”, “assignee”, “compiler”, “director”, etc.).

Best Practice: When to Use @contrib-type - If the @contrib-type value is from a controlled vocabulary, such as CRediT, Best Practice is not to use @contrib-type to name the role. Best Practice (when possible) is to tag the CRediT contributor role taxonomy term by using the <role> (with vocabulary attributes) element inside <contrib> or <contrib-group>. The major advantages of using <role> instead of @contrib-type are:

• the ability to tie the content of the role to a formal vocabulary using the four JATS vocabulary attributes, and
• the ability for a contributor to play more than one role in the creation of an article.

Of course, even when not using a controlled vocabulary, it is always possible to substitute the element <role> for the @contrib-type attribute.

Roles defined by the CRediT taxonomy may include, for example, “Conceptualization” (ideas; formulation or evolution of overarching research goals and aims), “Data curation” (management activities to annotate [produce metadata], scrub data and maintain research data [including software code, where it is necessary for interpreting the data itself] for initial use and later reuse), or “Writing – original draft” (creation and/or presentation of the published work, specifically writing the initial draft).