Authorship Guidelines
All persons designated as authors should qualify for authorship.
Authorship Qualification:
To qualify: each author should have participated sufficiently in the work to take public responsibility for the content. Authorship credit should be based on substantial contribution to conception and design, execution, or analysis and interpretation of data. All authors should be involved in drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content and must have read and approved the final version of the manuscript. Authors should adhere to the practices of their research field and the guidelines of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE). According to the ICMJE guidelines, all of the following 4 criteria must be met to be considered an author:
- 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.
Individuals who participated only in acquisition of funding, collection of data, or general supervision of a research group (i.e. institution leaders who were not actively involved in specific projects), does not justify authorship. These individuals should be included in the Acknowledgements.
Joint first authorship is allowed for a maximum of three authors. Note that their roles must be clear and justification must be given as to how they have carried out an equivalent amount of work.
The corresponding author is the individual who takes primary responsibility for communication with the journal during the manuscript submission, peer review, and publication process, and typically ensures that all the journal's administrative requirements, such as providing details of authorship, ethics committee approval, clinical trial registration documentation, and gathering conflict of interest forms and statements, are properly completed, although these duties may be delegated to one or more coauthors.
The corresponding author must be available and responsive throughout the submission and peer review process to respond to editorial queries in a timely way. These individuals should be available after publication to respond to critiques of the work and cooperate with any requests from the journal for data or additional information should questions about the paper arise after publication.
If an author is too senior, and thus busy, for this role then ensure the corresponding author chosen is someone able to respond in a timely manner. Significant publication delays occur due to lack of response from busy researchers who travel extensively, have heavy institutional responsibility, or receive a large volume of emails resulting in missing communication.
Individuals providing editing/writing aid do not qualify for authorship:
The involvement of scientific (medical) writers or anyone else who assisted with the preparation of the manuscript content should be included in the acknowledgements, along with their source of funding, as described in the European Medical Writers Association (EMWA) guidelines. The role of medical writers should be acknowledged explicitly in the 'Acknowledgements' of 'Authors' contributions' section as appropriate.
Acknowledgements:
All contributors who do not meet the above criteria for authorship should be listed in the 'Acknowledgements'. Examples of those who might be acknowledged include a person who provided purely technical or writing assistance, or a department or institutional head who provided only general support.
Group Authorship:
For large, multi-institutional project consortiums, we recommend the following. Using the Consortium Name as the author for the entire paper, which will appear as such in the indexing services. Then include in the article, a separate table that lists each institution with the researchers at that institution in the order preferred by that institution. The individuals in this list must all meet the ICMJE authorship guidelines.
Individual Author Contribution:
To give appropriate credit and to make sure all individuals listed as authors, the individual contributions of authors should be specified in 'Authors' contributions' section of the manuscript. (For general information, please see the CASRAI CRediT website). Individual author contribution is collection during the submission process, and has a curated format for each type of contribution designated on this page and stated in the table below:
| Contributor Role | Definition |
|---|---|
| Conceptualization | Ideas; formulation or evolution of overarching research goals and aims. |
| Supervision | Oversight and leadership responsibility for the research activity planning and execution, including mentorship external to the core team. |
| Project Administration | Management and coordination responsibility for the research activity planning and execution. |
| Investigation | Conducting a research and investigation process, specifically performing the experiments, or data/evidence collection. |
| Formal Analysis | Application of statistical, mathematical, computation, or other formal techniques to analyze or synthesize study data. |
| Software | Programming, software development; designing computer programs; implementation of the computer code and supporting algorithms; testing of existing code components. |
| Methodology | Development or design of methodology; creation of models. |
| Validation | Verification, whether as a part of the activity or separate, of the overall replication/reproducibility of results/experiments and other research outputs. |
| 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. |
| Resources | Provision of study materials, reagents, materials, patients, laboratory samples, animals, instrumentation, computing resources, or other analysis tools. |
| Funding Acquisition | Acquisition of the financial support for the project leading to this publication. |
| 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. |
| Visualization | Preparation, creation and/or presentation of the published work, specifically visualization/data presentation. |
We prefer that authors add this information in the "Authors' Contributions" section at the end of their manuscript, following the format below:
J.E.T. conceived of the study. F.O.A. performed data collection, data analysis, and produced the figured and scripts, with overall guidance from J.E.T. All authors wrote the manuscript. S.J.A. and F.O.A. deposited the data.
Addition or removal of authors after submission:
Other than in exceptional circumstances the journal does not allow the addition or removal of author names after submission without a detailed explanation provided in writing. A satisfactory explanation for any proposed changes in authors will be required.
Removal of an author requires a letter of consent from any person whose name has been removed, indicating that they agree to the removal of their name from the author list.
Owing to the complexity of these rules, we strongly advise authors to carefully assess the list of authors and work done in the paper to establish a fixed author list before submission and not attempt to make changes later.
