Authorship and contributorship
Authorship and contributorship
Authorship criteria
- In terms of what constitutes authorship, PoEM follows СОРЕ recommendations, and adopts the criteria that an author should meet as determined by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE). As per ICMJE, an author should meet all four of the following criteria:
- Substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data for the work; AND
- Drafting the work or revising it critically for important intellectual content; AND
- Final approval of the version to be published; AND
- 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.
Contributor role defined
- For a better description of individual contribution to the scholarly output, and in order to avoid authorship disputes, PoEM adopts CRediT taxonomy (https://credit.niso.org/), that identifies 14 contributor roles. An author can be involved in some or all of these roles, however, not all roles can be applicable to an article. The 14 roles are:
- Conceptualization– Ideas; formulation or evolution of overarching research goals and aims.
- Data curation– Management activities to annotate (produce metadata), scrub data and maintain research data (including software code, where it is necessary for interpreting the data itself) for initial use and later re-use.
- Formal analysis– Application of statistical, mathematical, computational, or other formal techniques to analyze or synthesize study data.
- Funding acquisition– Acquisition of the financial support for the project leading to this publication.
- Investigation– Conducting a research and investigation process, specifically performing the experiments, or data/evidence collection.
- Methodology– Development or design of methodology; creation of models.
- Project administration– Management and coordination responsibility for the research activity planning and execution.
- Resources– Provision of study materials, reagents, materials, patients, laboratory samples, animals, instrumentation, computing resources, or other analysis tools.
- Software– Programming, software development; designing computer programs; implementation of the computer code and supporting algorithms; testing of existing code components.
- Supervision– Oversight and leadership responsibility for the research activity planning and execution, including mentorship external to the core team.
- Validation– Verification, whether as a part of the activity or separate, of the overall replication/reproducibility of results/experiments and other research outputs.
- Visualization– Preparation, creation and/or presentation of the published work, specifically visualization/data presentation.
- Writing – original draft– Preparation, creation and/or presentation of the published work, specifically writing the initial draft (including substantive translation).
- Writing – review & editing– Preparation, creation and/or presentation of the published work by those from the original research group, specifically critical review, commentary or revision – including pre- or post-publication stages.
PoEM authorship/contributorship policy
Authorship/contributorship declaration
- In the cover letter, authors have to declare that they fulfill the authorship criteria adopted by our journal, indicate each author’s contribution to the paper, and admit being responsible for the integrity and originality of the paper. The declaration should be signed by all authors. Besides, they have to declare that no one who deserves to be mentioned as author has been omitted. We may consider contacting the named authors to make sure that no one has been included without his/her consent.
- The Contributors to the work (individuals or institutions) who cannot be considered as authors could be listed in an acknowledgment, and their contributions should be specified. Acknowledged individuals should agree to be acknowledged. The corresponding author may be asked to provide the written consent from all acknowledged individuals.
- When the number of authors is not correlated with the complexity or content of the article, we may inquire about the real contribution of each author. Consequently, authors may be asked to remove some names that they can mention in the acknowledgement part.
- If the article has several authors, a corresponding author should be determined to correspond with the journal's editors and control for the article processing.
Changes in authorship
- If changes to authorship are requested after submission or publication, an explanation should be provided, and a signed agreement to the changes should be submitted by all authors, and by the author to be removed or added. PoEM abides by COPE recommendations in this matter by referring to All Flowcharts | COPE - Committee on Publication Ethics.