Authorship and contributorship
Authors’ responsibility
The authors of each manuscript are asked to confirm that:
1) The manuscript has not been previously published or submitted elsewhere;
2) They made a significant contribution to the work and approved the final version of the manuscript;
3) Their work complies with ethical standards;
4) They are 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;
5) They have obtained all necessary permissions to publish any figures or tables in the manuscript and assure that the authors will pay for Article Processing Charges (APC) if applicable.
Authorship criteria
We require authors to refer to the criteria recommended by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) for defining authorship (1):
1) Substantial contributions to the conception and design of the study; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of the data for the work; AND
2) Drafting the article or reviewing it critically for important intellectual content; AND
3) Final approval of the version to be published; AND
4) Agreement 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.
Contributors who meet fewer than all 4 of the above criteria for authorship should not be listed as authors, but they should be acknowledged. Examples of activities that alone (without other contributions) do not qualify a contributor for authorship are acquisition of funding; general supervision of a research group or general administrative support; writing assistance, technical editing, language editing, and proofreading. Additionally, AI tools cannot be listed as an author of a paper as AI tools cannot meet the requirements for authorship and cannot take responsibility for the submitted work (1-3).
Authors must disclose in the Cover letter, Materials and Methods, and the Acknowledgement for applying any AI tools (e.g., ChatGPT, Bing) in the writing of a manuscript, production of images or graphical elements of the paper, or in the collection and analysis of data. Disclosure should include - but is not limited to - all prompts used to generate new text, or to convert text or text prompts into tables or illustrations; the full prompt used to generate the research results; the time and date of a query; and the AI tool used and its version. Authors are fully responsible for the content of their manuscript, even those parts produced by an AI tool, and are thus liable for any breach of publication ethics. For more recommendations, please refer to the WAME Recommendations on Chatbots and Generative Artificial Intelligence in Relation to Scholarly Publications: https://wame.org/page3.php?id=106.
Author contributions
Author contribution describes the contribution each author made to the manuscript. The ‘Contributions’ section should be presented as follows:
(I) Conception and design:
(II) Administrative support:
(III) Provision of study materials or patients:
(IV) Collection and assembly of data:
(V) Data analysis and interpretation:
(VI) Manuscript writing: All authors
(VII) Final approval of manuscript: All authors
Note: 1. With VI and VII, “All authors/Both authors (when there are only two authors)” is obligatory, while the other credits are case-based; 2. The ‘Contributions’ section is not required when there is only one author.
Changes to authorship or contributorship
If there is any change in authorship and/or contributorship after the initial submission, approval from all authors must be presented. This applies to additions, deletions, changes of order to the authors, or contributions being attributed differently. Any change must be explained to the Editor. The Editor may seek ascertainment from any of the authors/contributors regarding whether they have agreed to any change.
When disagreements among authors arise, AME follows the guidance of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE): https://publicationethics.org/guidance/Flowcharts.
References
1. https://www.icmje.org/recommendations/
2. https://publicationethics.org/
Updated on November 7, 2023