Authorship Policy

Authorship confers credit and accountability.

Individuals listed as authors must have made substantial intellectual contributions to the work and must be able to take responsibility for the published article.

Authorship Criteria

An author should normally:

make a substantial contribution to the conception, design, data acquisition, analysis, interpretation, or substantive scholarly development of the work;
participate in drafting the manuscript or critically revising it for important intellectual content;
approve the final version for publication; and
agree to be accountable for the integrity of the work.

Individuals who contribute to the research but do not qualify for authorship should be acknowledged appropriately.

CRediT Contributor Statement

The journal encourages authors to describe contributions using the Contributor Roles Taxonomy (CRediT), including roles such as:

Conceptualization;
Methodology;
Investigation;
Formal Analysis;
Data Curation;
Writing – Original Draft;
Writing – Review and Editing;
Visualization;
Supervision;
Project Administration; and
Funding Acquisition.

Corresponding Author

The corresponding author is responsible for:

communicating with the journal;
ensuring all eligible authors are included;
ensuring no ineligible authors are included;
obtaining approval of the final manuscript from all authors;
communicating editorial decisions to co-authors; and
ensuring required declarations are complete.

Unacceptable Authorship Practices

The journal prohibits:

gift authorship;
honorary authorship;
guest authorship;
ghost authorship;
purchased authorship; and
authorship manipulation.

Changes in Authorship

Requests to add, remove, or rearrange authors after submission must be accompanied by:

a clear explanation; and
written agreement from all affected authors.

Requests following acceptance will be approved only in exceptional circumstances.

Artificial Intelligence

AI systems cannot qualify for authorship.