Authorship and contributorship

The criteria

We apply the ICMJE criteria in full. An author must meet all four:

• Substantial contribution to the conception or design of the work, or to the acquisition, analysis or interpretation of data.
• Drafting the work or revising it critically for important intellectual content.
• Final approval of the version to be published.
• Agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work, including ensuring that questions about the accuracy or integrity of any part are appropriately investigated and resolved.

Meeting only the first criterion does not make someone an author. Acquiring funding, collecting data, or general supervision of a research group does not by itself constitute authorship.

Anyone who contributed but does not meet all four criteria should be named in the acknowledgements, with their contribution described and their permission obtained.

Contributor statements

Every research article must include a contributor statement using the CRediT taxonomy, naming which authors performed which roles: conceptualization, data curation, formal analysis, funding acquisition, investigation, methodology, project administration, resources, software, supervision, validation, visualization, writing – original draft, writing – review and editing.

Corresponding author

The corresponding author is responsible for communication during submission, review and publication, for confirming that every listed author has approved the submission, for managing the declarations, and for responding to questions after publication. The role carries no additional authorship credit.

Practices we treat as misconduct

• Gift or honorary authorship — listing someone who did not meet the criteria, whether out of deference, seniority or reciprocity.
• Ghost authorship — omitting someone who did meet them, including professional writers whose involvement is not disclosed.
• Guest authorship — adding a well-known name to improve the manuscript’s reception.
• Sale or purchase of authorship, including through paper mills and authorship brokers.
• Coercing a junior colleague to add or drop a name.

Paper-mill activity is a serious and growing problem. Manuscripts showing its markers — templated structure, mismatched author expertise, untraceable affiliations, unverifiable data, brokered submission — are investigated and reported to the authors’ institutions.

Group and collaborative authorship

Where a study is by a named group, the article may list the group as an author, with individual members who meet the criteria listed in the byline or in a supplementary list. Make clear in the manuscript which arrangement applies, so the metadata deposited with Crossref and indexing services is accurate and every listed contributor is discoverable.

Changes to the author list

Before acceptance: a request to add, remove or reorder authors must come from the corresponding author, with a reason, plus written agreement from all authors, including any author being added or removed. The editor may ask for institutional confirmation.

After acceptance but before publication: the same, and the editor may ask why the change was not raised earlier.

After publication: the change is published as a correction. See [corrections, retractions and expressions of concern](/corrections-and-retractions). A change that goes to whether authorship was properly attributed at all is referred to the authors’ institution.

Deceased authors

Where an author dies before publication, the corresponding author informs the editor, the article notes the death, and next of kin are consulted where practical.

ORCID

We ask every author to supply an ORCID identifier, and require one from the corresponding author where the journal has adopted this. ORCID makes authorship attributable to a real, verifiable person and is deposited with the article metadata.

Disputes

An authorship dispute is not a matter a journal can adjudicate. We follow the COPE flowchart: the manuscript is put on hold, the parties are asked to resolve it, and where they cannot, the matter is referred to the corresponding author’s institution. We act on the institution’s finding. A published article subject to an unresolved dispute may carry an expression of concern.

Artificial intelligence

AI tools cannot be authors and cannot be listed as contributors. See [use of AI in research and publishing](/ai-policy).