Authorship and Contributorship
Authorship
The journal follows the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals (Updated May 2023). Authorship is based on the following four criteria:
- Substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data for the work; AND
- Drafting the work or revising it critically for important intellectual content; AND
- Final approval of the version to be published; AND
- Agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.
An author should be able to specify which co-authors are responsible for particular other portions of the work in addition to being accountable for the parts of the work he or she has done. Furthermore, authors should have faith in the integrity of their co-authors' contributions.
The journal includes only one corresponding author per article.
Authors should meet all four ICMJE criteria for authorship, and all who meet the four criteria should be identified as authors.
The journal recognises only natural persons over 18 years of age as authors. Thus, authorship by an artificial intelligence is not considered. Author using an artificial intelligence should inform the details in the acknowledgment.
Contributorship
The journal follows the National Information Standards Organization's CRediT (Contributor Roles Taxonomy). CRediT is a broad classification system that consists of 14 roles and is used to depict the roles usually taken on by those who contribute to research works. Each role outlines the particular contribution made by the contributor to the academic output.
- 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 re-use.
- Formal analysis: Application of statistical, mathematical, computational, or other formal techniques to analyse or synthesize study data.
- Funding acquisition: Acquisition of the financial support for the project leading to this publication.
- Investigation: Conducting a research and investigation process, specifically performing the experiments, or data/evidence collection.
- Methodology: Development or design of methodology; creation of models.
- Project administration: Management and coordination responsibility for the research activity planning and execution.
- Resources: Provision of study materials, reagents, materials, patients, laboratory samples, animals, instrumentation, computing resources, or other analysis tools.
- Software: Programming, software development; designing computer programs; implementation of the computer code and supporting algorithms; testing of existing code components.
- Supervision: Oversight and leadership responsibility for the research activity planning and execution, including mentorship external to the core team.
- Validation: Verification, whether as a part of the activity or separate, of the overall replication/reproducibility of results/experiments and other research outputs.
- Visualization: Preparation, creation and/or presentation of the published work, specifically visualization/data presentation.
- Writing – original draft: Preparation, creation and/or presentation of the published work, specifically writing the initial draft (including substantive translation).
- Writing – review & editing: Preparation, creation and/or presentation of the published work by those from the original research group, specifically critical review, commentary or revision – including pre- or post-publication stages.