Authorship Policy

Authorship Credit

Authorship credits may only be given to those who have made a substantial contribution to constructing the article. The corresponding author of the article holds the responsibility to give credit to the co-authors that are significantly involved in the work. Also, the corresponding author should make sure that all the co-authors have approved the final submission and ready-to-publish version of the article. Others who have participated in certain substantive aspects of the research should be acknowledged for their contribution in an "Acknowledgement" section.

 Changes in Authorship

The authors are fully responsible for providing the names of the authors upon submitting the article to the journal. Once the article is accepted for publication, any addition, deletion, or rearrangement of the authors’ names will not be entertained unless approved by the journal’s editor. To request such a change, the corresponding author must provide the journal’s editor with (a) the reason for the change in the author list and (b) written confirmation (e-mail, letter) from all authors that they agree with the addition, removal, or rearrangement, along with the confirmation from the author being added or removed. Only in exceptional circumstances and with considerable reason/s will the editor consider the addition, deletion, or rearrangement of authors after the manuscript has been accepted. While the editor considers the request, the processing of the manuscript for publication will be put on hold. If the manuscript has already been published in an online issue, any requests may not be entertained by the editor.

 Order of Authors

It is the responsibility of the authors to have a mutual agreement on the order of the authors before submitting the article to the journal. Any such disagreements must be ruled out before the submission.

Guest Authorship

The “guest” author makes no significant contributions to the study and, hence, does not qualify for authorship. The journal does not allow the appearance of guest authorship on the articles.

Anonymous Authorship

Because authorship should be transparent and require public accountability, it is not appropriate to use pseudonyms or to publish scientific reports anonymously. In extremely rare cases, when the author can make a credible claim that attaching his or her name to the document could cause serious hardship (e.g., a threat to personal safety or loss of employment), a journal editor may decide to publish anonymous content.

 Acknowledgement

In the Acknowledgments section, authors may wish to include the names and contributions of those whose involvement in a study did not qualify them for authorship (because of the journal policy) but have contributed to the article in some way.

 Contributors

"Ghost" and/or "Guest" author phenomenon has been common in the traditional listing of research papers. This has been raising inappropriate authorship practices in which some individuals did not have actual input in the experiment. For this, the journal highly recommends that only authors who have made a significant scientific contribution to the research in the manuscript be listed individually in the submitted manuscript (including students and lab technicians).

 Duplicate Submission

Articles that are found to have been published elsewhere, or are under consideration for publishing elsewhere, will be considered "duplicated" material. In case the author(s) have used their own previously published work (or work that is currently under review), they are asked to cite the previous work and indicate how their submitted manuscript offers novel contributions and adds value differently (from the previous work).

Citation Manipulation

Submitted manuscripts that are found to include citations to increase the number of citations to a given author’s work, or to articles published in a particular journal, will be considered as a "citation manipulation"-containing material.