Author and His/Her Responsibilities

Authorship confers credit and has important social, financial, and academic. It also implies responsibility and accountability for published work. The by-line of the article identifies who is directly responsible for the manuscript. Authorship is based on the following criteria-

Contributing substantially in structuring and designing the workflow or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data for the work.
Drafting the work and further revising it critically for important intellectual content.
Ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of the specific part of the work are appropriately investigated and addressed.

The individuals are designated as authors who meet these above criteria and ideally should do so when planning the work, making appropriate modifications as the work progresses. The submitting author known as the corresponding author takes primary responsibility for communication with the journal during the manuscript submission, peer review, and identify which co-authors are responsible for specific parts of the work. Before submitting, the author typically ensures that all the journal’s administrative requirements, such as providing details of authorship, clinical trial registration documentation, ethics committee approval, and gathering conflict of interest forms and statements, are properly completed. However, authors should have confidence in the integrity of the contributions of their co-authors.

If authors request removal or addition of an author after manuscript submission or publication, editors should seek an explanation and signed statement of agreement for the requested change from all co-authors. After the publication of the manuscript, the corresponding author is responsible for the accuracy of all content in the proof, including the names of co-authors, addresses, and affiliations. After acceptance, the corresponding author is the point of contact for queries about the published paper. Its submitting author responsibility to inform all co-authors if any matter arises in relation to the published paper and to ensure such matters are dealt with promptly. Authors of published material are responsible to inform the journal immediately if they become aware of any aspects that require correction.

To support the above statements, editors may request that authors of a study to sign a statement, such as “I had full access to all of the data in this study and I take complete responsibility for the integrity of the data and the accuracy of the data analysis.”

Conflicts of Interest

The concerned journal should be informed of any significant conflict of interest that editors, authors or reviewers may have, in order to determine if any action has to be taken. An editor, author, or reviewer may wish to disclose a conflict of interest to the journal editorial office that would be embarrassing if it became generally known. Please note that a Conflicts of interest (COI) statement is required for all submitted manuscripts. If no conflicts exist, please state that ‘There are no conflicts to declare‘ under a Conflicts of interest heading as the last section before your Acknowledgements.

Detailed Responsibilities of an Authors

Collect and deduce data in a candid way. It should not contain fictitious or manipulated data, plagiarised material, reference omissions, false priority statements, incorrect authorship.
When reproducing figures from previous publications, it is the author’s responsibility to seek appropriate permission from the relevant publishers.
Present a concise and accurate report of their study and an objective discussion of its significance.
Give due recognition to previously published work which is related to their submitted manuscript by providing appropriate references and citations. If a significant amount of other people’s material is used, permission must be sought by the author in accordance with copyright law.
Declare all sources of funding for the work in the manuscript, and also to declare a conflict of interest if any.
Make sure that their submitted articles contain no personal criticism of other scientists.
Avoid undue fragmentation of their work into multiple manuscripts.
Do not engage in redundant publication. It is not acceptable for an author to submit the same manuscript to more than one journal at a time.
Consider publishing-related manuscripts in the same journal or a small group of journals that can be benefitted to the readers.
Inform the editor if any related manuscripts are under consideration for publication by the same author in any journal and also on submission of their current manuscript. Authors should provide copies of these related manuscripts, and details of their present status immediately.
Ensuring that original data or materials upon which the submission is based are conserved following best practices in the field so that they are retrievable for reanalysis.
Foreseeing and minimizing obstacles to the sharing of data or materials described in the study
Ensuring that all authors have certified the author list and author contributions

Funding Information

Providing accurate funding information will increase the visibility of your work. A clear acknowledgment of funder support is an important consideration in funder evaluation and will improve your chances of securing funding in the future. Accurately recording funding information helps to increase transparency in the funding of research.

Human & Animal Welfare

When a study involves the use of live animals or human subjects, authors must include in the ‘methodology’ section of the manuscript a statement stating “all experiments were performed in compliance with the author’s institute’s policy on animal use and ethics”.

Author Identification

As part of our efforts to improve transparency and unambiguous attribution of scholarly contributions, corresponding authors of published papers must provide their Open Researcher and Contributor Identifier (ORCID) iD; co-authors are encouraged to provide ORCiD iDs.