Authorship and Contributorship

When considering who can be considered an “author” we follow the guidelines set out by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) which state that in order to be considered an author, one must meet all of the below requirements (as taken from the ICMJE):

  • Have made substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition of data for the work; and
  • Have been involved in drafting the work or reviewing it critically for important intellectual content; and
  • Given final approval of the version to be published; and
  • Have agreed 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.

Anyone who does not fulfill all four criteria should be listed in the acknowledgements.

If a collaboration group should be listed as an author, the group name should be listed along with all individual members of the group that accept responsibility for the article (as defined by the Council of Science Editors). All individual members of a collaboration group can then be listed in the “Acknowledgements” section.

Large Language Models or other artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted technologies cannot be listed as an author. However, if any AI-assisted technologies were used at any stage during the research or in the preparation of the paper, this should be noted in the cover letter and documented in the Materials and Methods section. Any text or images which have been produced by AI should be carefully controlled and verified to be free of any plagiarism, errors, or biases.

When writing the Authors Contributions statement, we request that authors use the CRediT format, which is a taxonomy system that includes 14 defined roles that can be used to represent the various possible author contributions. By identifying who performed what work, one increases transparency as well as ensuring that credit and responsibility for the work are attributed to the appropriate individual(s).