What does “Software” mean in CRediT?

Software is one of the 14 roles in ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022, the CRediT standard developed by the National Information Standards Organization (NISO). The definition is about programming and software development: designing programs, implementing code and the algorithms that support it, and testing code components that already exist. NISO’s example tasks add debugging, documenting, sharing and maintaining code; building and looking after digital infrastructure, libraries and databases; extracting, mining and parsing data or content for a study; and making sure code and systems keep working across different environments.

The line with Formal analysis comes from NISO’s examples. Statistical tests that compare groups and machine-learning models that predict outcomes are listed under Formal analysis, whereas Software describes the code behind such work. Because building computational simulations is also a Formal analysis example, the two roles can overlap. Creating models falls under Methodology, while implementing code and algorithms falls under Software, and code needed to interpret a dataset is also mentioned in the Data curation definition. Digital infrastructure appears under Resources as well.