Authorship and Contributorship

Authorship

We require authors to refer to the criteria recommended by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) for defining authorship:

  • 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 any concerns about the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.

The names of the authors should be provided according to the previous citations or as the authors would want them to be published, along with the institutional affiliations, current address, telephone, cell and fax numbers, and email addresses. The email address must be provided with an asterisk in front of the name of the principal author. The corresponding author(s) should be designated, and their complete address, business telephone and fax numbers, and email address must be stated to receive correspondence and galley proofs. 

Contributorship

We encourage authors to list anyone who does not meet the criteria for authorship in an Acknowledgments section in their publication with permission, for example, to recognize the contributions of anyone who provided research or writing help. Some journals have adopted contributorship taxonomies, such as CReDiT, and/or may publish contributorship statements within manuscripts. Please refer to individual journal information pages for further details.

Changes to authorship or contributorship

Authors must provide a final list of authors at the time of submission, ensuring the correct sequence of the names of authors, which will not be considered for any addition, deletion, or rearrangement after final submission of the manuscript. If a change is essentially required, it can only be done with the editor’s approval, for which the editor must receive the following from the corresponding author:

  1. The reason for the change in the author list and the sequence
  2. A confirmation is a prerequisite from all the co-authors for any amendment or removal.

The editor will only consider any amendment to the author's list if it is a must. Publication of the manuscript will be withheld during consideration of the request. However, if the manuscript has already been published online, requests approved thereafter by the editor will cause an erratum or corrigendum.