E-ISSN 2534-9821
 

Publishing Ethics



Authorship

Authorship credit should be based on: 1) Substantial contributions to conception and design, acquisition of data, or analysis and interpretation of data; 2) Drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content; 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.

Authors should meet conditions 1, 2, 3, and 4.

When a large, multicenter group has conducted the work, the group should identify the individuals who accept direct responsibility for the manuscript (3). These individuals should fully meet the criteria for authorship/contributorship defined above, and editors will ask these individuals to complete journal-specific author and conflict-of-interest disclosure forms. When submitting a manuscript authored by a group, the corresponding author should clearly indicate the preferred citation and identify all individual authors as well as the group name. Journals generally list other members of the group in the Acknowledgments.

Acquisition of funding, collection of data, or general supervision of the research group alone does not constitute authorship.

All persons designated as authors should qualify for authorship, and all those who qualify should be listed.

Each author should have participated sufficiently in the work to take public responsibility for appropriate portions of the content.

Increasingly, authorship of multicenter trials is attributed to a group. All members of the group who are named as authors should fully meet the above criteria for authorship/contributorship.

The group should jointly make decisions about contributors/authors before submitting the manuscript for publication. The corresponding author/guarantor should be prepared to explain the presence and order of these individuals. It is not the role of editors to make authorship/contributorship decisions or to arbitrate conflicts related to authorship.

Changes to authorship

Dove does not permit the changing/adding/deleting of authors after acceptance of the paper.

Contributors Listed in Acknowledgments

All contributors who do not meet the criteria for authorship should be listed in an acknowledgments section. Examples of those who might be acknowledged include a person who provided purely technical help, writing assistance, or a department chairperson who provided only general support. Authors should declare whether they had assistance with study design, data collection, data analysis, or manuscript preparation. If such assistance was available, the authors should disclose the identity of the individuals who provided this assistance and the entity that supported it in the published article. Financial and material support should also be acknowledged.

 

Groups of persons who have contributed materially to the article but whose contributions do not justify authorship may be listed under such headings as “clinical investigators” or “participating investigators,” and their function or contribution should be described—for example, “served as scientific advisors,” “critically reviewed the study proposal,” “collected data,” or “provided and cared for study patients.” Because readers may infer their endorsement of the data and conclusions, these persons must give written permission to be acknowledged.

Please note: the Authorship and “Contributors Listed in Acknowledgments” sections are reprinted from the ICMJE Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals. Users should cite this official version when citing the document.

Authors Declaration and Warranties

By submitting any research article for the purposes of publication by International Journal of Medical Reviews and Case Reports (IJMRCR) the authors must certify and warrant that:

  • The submitting author has been authorised by any co-authors to submit the research article;
  • and they are the sole author(s) of the article and are legally able and entitled to submit the article and authorise IJMRCR to publish the research article. If the law requires that the article be published in the public domain, I/we will notify IJMRCR at the time of submission.
  • The research article is original, has not already been published in any other journal (medical, or otherwise) or is not currently under consideration for publication by another journal, and does not infringe any existing copyright or any other rights prescribed by law;
  • The article contains nothing that is unlawful, defamatory, or which would, if published, constitute a breach of contract or of confidentiality;
  • Due care, diligence and all other requisite investigations were carried out in the preparation of the research article(s) to ensure its accuracy. To the best of their knowledge all statements contained in it purporting to be factual are true and correct.

Common Issues

Number of authors

Consideration should be given to the number of qualified authors needed to take responsibility for the publication. To some extent, this will depend on the complexity of the research and of the publication, but it would be unusual in biomedical research (with few exceptions) to require >10 authors to meet this need. A high number of authors calls into question whether they could all have provided "substantial intellectual contribution." Fewer authors are often preferable, and others can be acknowledged (e.g., as nonauthor contributors or collaborators).

Author sequence

Authors should decide how this will be determined at the initiation of the work, including the designation of the lead and corresponding authors, who may or may not be the same person. Final order, however, should be based on authors' actual roles and contributions in the development of the publication (and therefore cannot be agreed upon until this in complete). Those who made the greatest contribution are generally listed first, but alphabetical order may also be used. It may be useful to describe in the contributorship section of the publication whether alphabetical order or some other convention was used to determine author order.

Addition or removal or author

In certain circumstances during the development of a publication, it may be necessary to add or remove an author (e.g., if an author fails to provide a substantial contribution or approve the final version of the work). In such cases, all authors should agree to the change.

Death or incapacity of an author

Should an author die after completing a major part of the work, posthumous authorship can be considered if agreed to by all other authors. We suggest, as a first step, seeking advice on correct attribution and process from journal instructions or the editorial office.

If the journal agrees to posthumous authorship but requires submission forms to be signed, then in the case of a sponsor-employed author or a contractor, a supervisor may be the most appropriate proxy. Otherwise, a family member or person with power of attorney should be approached. In all cases, efforts should be made to contact the family of the deceased author to inform them of the intention and request their consent to the listing or acknowledgment.

Change of affiliation

If an author changes affiliation before the work is published, his or her affiliation should reflect where the major part of the work was done. The current affiliation and contact details should be listed in the acknowledgment section. Change of affiliation alone is not a valid reason to remove an author from a publication if he or she meets authorship criteria.

Company- or sponsor-employed authors

Sponsor-employed scientists and clinicians are often qualified to participate as authors of company-sponsored research publications and should have that opportunity. Such authors should not be denied authorship because of concerns about perception of bias. Whatever criteria are used to determine authorship should be applied equally to company employees, contractors, and others.

Professional writers as authors

Professional medical writers who meet applicable authorship criteria should be listed as authors. If writers do not meet authorship criteria, their contribution should be disclosed (e.g., as a nonauthor contributor in the acknowledgment section). Writers who were not involved with study design, data collection, or data analysis and interpretation (e.g., those developing a primary publication from a clinical study report) generally do not meet International Committee of Medical Journal Editors authorship criteria. However, professional writers working on other types of publication (e.g., literature reviews) may qualify as authors.

Please note: The "Authorship: Common issues" section was adapted from Battisti WP, Wager E, Baltzer L, Bridges D, Cairns A, Carswell CI, et al. Good Publication Practice for Communicating Company-Sponsored Medical Research: GPP3. Ann Intern Med. 2015;163:461-464. doi:10.7326/M15-0288 Appendix Table 2. Common Issues About Authorship.

Competing interests

IJMRCR requires that all authors, peer reviewers and editors disclose all potential conflicts of interests. All authors must also complete the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) form for Disclosure of Potential Conflicts of Interest.

Editors and reviewers are also required to declare any competing interests and will be excluded from the peer review process if a competing interest exists.

Editors-in-Chief must declare any financial and/or personal conflict of interest for each submitted manuscript, and decisions on manuscripts in which they have a conflict of interest will be made by another editor. The Editor-in-Chief is sent conflict of interest forms for every author on the paper he/she is reviewing. To preserve editorial integrity and eliminate bias, the Editor-in-Chief is not aware of the fee structure for any of the papers he/she reviews. Editorial decisions for manuscripts commissioned or solicited by the Editor-in-Chief will not be made by that Editor-in-Chief. Where the Editor-in-Chief, Associate Editor, or Editorial Board member submits a paper to their own IJMRCR journal, the policy is that another Editor on that journal is responsible for making the editorial decision (in accordance with section 9 of the COPE Ethical Editing guide, see also COPE case number 05-22 "Editor as author in own journal"). In this case we would also require a minimum of two sets of independent peer-review comments.

The author(s) of a manuscript submitted to any IJMRCR are required to complete a declaration of competing interest for any commercial associations or financial interests held by the author or immediate members of the author's family, which might be construed as posing a conflict of interest, including but not limited to consultancies, employment, expert testimony, honoraria, retainers, stock holdings or options, and membership on boards of for-profit organizations with a financial interest in the article. All competing interests will be listed in the declarations at the end of the article.

The authors should consider the following questions when completing their competing interest declaration:

Financial competing interests

In the past three years have they received any funding from an organization that may have a financial interest in the manuscript?

Do they hold any stock holdings or options in an organization that may have financial interest in the publication of this manuscript?

Does the content of the manuscript relate to any patents they hold or are they currently applying for?

Have they received any funding or salary from an organization that holds or has applied for patents relating to the content of the manuscript?

Do they have any other financial competing interests?

Non-financial competing interests

Are there any non-financial competing interests to declare in relation to the manuscript? Examples of non-financial competing interests include family associations, political, religious, academic or any other.

If the authors are unsure as to whether they, or one their co-authors, has a competing interest, they should discuss this with the editor.

IJMRCR subscribes to the general intent of the principles adopted by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) on the control of data in publications arising from sponsored research. The author submitting a manuscript for any study funded by an organization with a proprietary or financial interest in the outcome shall have access to all the data in that study, and to have complete responsibility for the integrity and accuracy of the data, and the decision to publish.

Funding

IJMRCR requires that authors declare all the sources of funding including financial support in their manuscript. The authors should describe the role of the sponsor(s), if any, in any of the stages from study design to submission of the manuscript for publication. They should also state if the sponsor(s) had no such involvement.

Data deposition and data sharing

IJMRCR encourages authors of original research articles to include a statement in their manuscript about where data supporting the results reported in an article can be found and about data sharing including, where applicable, links to the publicly archived datasets. The statement of data availability should explain which additional unpublished data from the study, if any, are available, to whom, and how these can be obtained. These datasets can also be cited in the reference list and this is particularly encouraged when the datasets have a Digital Object Identifier (DOI). In cases where authors do not wish to share their data or are unable to do so, they should state that data will not be shared and the reasons why.

The authors are also encouraged to deposit their dataset in a data repository such as Dryad or figshare. Dryad provides authors with a DOI for the dataset to aid citation and provide a permanent link to the data. Note that Dryad hosts data using a CC0 license so authors should check that this is suitable for the data that they are depositing.

A non-exhaustive list of repositories for research data is available on the DataCite organization website.

Drug nomenclature

International Journal of Medical Reviews and Case Reports requires that the authors use the non-proprietary (generic) name of a drug throughout a manuscript whenever possible. The authors should give the chemical name or formula when a drug does not have a non-proprietary name. If this isn’t possible, for example for complex formulations, a drug can be identified by the proprietary (trade) name as appropriate and the non-proprietary name used subsequently. The active ingredients should be specified in the text after the first use of the proprietary name.

 

In the United States, check non-proprietary names in the American Drug Index, Merck Index, United States Pharmacopeia (USP), Physician’s Desk Reference, National Formulary, or United States Adopted Names (USAN), In the United Kingdom, the authors should refer to https://www.medicines.org.uk/emc/.

When the use of a proprietary name is necessary, the authors should place the non-proprietary name in parentheses immediately after the first mention of the proprietary name and use the non-proprietary name thereafter (once in the Abstract and once in the body of the manuscript is acceptable).

If an alternative non-proprietary name and a proprietary name are used, both may appear in parentheses at first mention.

When the salt is included in the non-proprietary name, it should only be given once.

The authors should capitalize proprietary names as appropriate and use the registered trademark symbol at first mention only.

Reporting guidelines

IJMRCR encourages authors to use the relevant research reporting guidelines for the study type provided by the EQUATOR Network, in order to ensure that enough information is provided for editors, peer reviewers and readers to understand how the research was performed and to judge whether the findings are likely to be reliable.