Authorship credit should be based only on substantial contributions to each of the three components mentioned below:
- Concept and design of study or acquisition of data or analysis and interpretation of data;
- Drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content; and
- Final approval of the version to be published.
- Participation solely in the acquisition of funding or the collection of data does not justify authorship
- General supervision of the research group is not sufficient for authorship.
- Each contributor should have participated sufficiently in the work to take public responsibility for appropriate portions of the content of the manuscript.
- The order of naming the contributors should be based on the relative contribution of the contributor towards the study and writing the manuscript.
- Once submitted the order cannot be changed without written consent of all the contributors.
Contribution Details
Contributors should provide a description of contributions made by each of them towards the manuscript.
Description should be divided in following categories, as applicable: concept, design, definition of intellectual content, literature search, clinical studies, experimental studies, data acquisition, data analysis, statistical analysis, manuscript preparation, manuscript editing and manuscript review. A contribution form for the same is provided on the journal website and the authors have to submit the same with the paper at the time of submission of the manuscript.
The corresponding author should take responsibility for the integrity of the work as a whole from inception to published article and should be designated as 'guarantor'.