Authorship and contributorship

When defining authorship of AR&P journal articles, we take into account the COPE recommendations (Committee on Publication Ethics). Besides, we observe the CSE principles (Council of Science Editors). Roles of authors and contributors are determined by ICMJE (International Committee of Medical Journal Editors).

According to the COPE recommendations, a manuscript author (co-author) is a person who either owns an idea or develops and implements research through dissemination of intellectual and creative works. Authors perform the research and do not violate the copyright or other rights.

The journal establishes trusting relationships with authors based on their acceptance of publication ethical standards as well as publishing and editorial policies. It means that authors must demonstrate only their own unique ideas and research results in the article, should not submit the paper to several journals simultaneously, must not borrow other authors’ ideas. Also, they should not use reviewers to improve the article quality for submission to another journal. Besides, it means that the authors studied the issue of possible conflicts of interest availability and made sure that they were absent.

According to ICMJE recomendations, the authorship is based on the following criteria supported by the journal:

  • Substantial contributions to work conception or design; acquisition, analysis or interpretation of data;
  • Drafting the work or revising it critically for important intellectual content;
  • Final approval of publication text;
  • Agreement to be accountable for all work aspects in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.

Contributors who do not meet all four criteria should not be listed as authors, but they should be acknowledged. Such persons can be listed in the Acknowledgement article sections with description of their contribution to the research.

Co-authors should understand and share the entire research conception whose results are represented in the article rather than account for their sole contribution.

All persons listed as authors must meet all the four ICMJE criteria for authorship. For each author, his or her personal contribution to the writing of the article and conducting the research should be determined. Only real authors can claim authorship.

When submitting an article, all individuals who contributed to its preparation will be considered:

  • Persons who have made a significant contribution to the research, but whose contribution is not authorship, should be clearly identified in the cover letter and manuscript.
  • Individuals who did not make a significant contribution to research results, but whose participation, advice or help were important in the implementation of the research.
  • Persons who supported funding of the research results are mentioned at the article end with the funding source.

Each article with several authors has a corresponding author. The corresponding author communicates with editors and controls article processing. This person should be defined in the Cover Letter, the template of which is presented on the websites of the journals in the Review Process section. The corresponding author has the right to communicate with the Editorial Board on behalf of all authors (to disagree with reviewers reasonably, to declare the article withdrawal, etc. The managing editor sends copies of letters to all co-authors during communication with the corresponding author to prevent misunderstandings within the authors’ team.

Changes in the list of co-authors or the order of authorship must be justified. If there are any changes among co-authors, added or excluded persons must give their consent in a letter to the staff. Then, the managing editor will send a new letter for signing. After that, all co-authors must approve the change and sign a new cover letter. Similarly, a cover letter will need to be re-signed in case of a change in the authorship order.

The Editorial Board does not impose restrictions on the number of co-authors. However, if the research is not well-correlated with the number of co-authors, the editorial staff may request for detailed information regarding the contribution of each co-author to the research and the article preparation.

In cases where too many people are listed as co-authors of an article, the Editorial Board may suggest that the research team list as authors only the main researchers who made the greatest contribution to its implementation, and that other co-authors be listed in the text of the article with a clear indication of their personal contribution to the research.

If the research group includes a significant number of members, it may decide to indicate the authorship of the article by the name of the group with or without the names of individual authors. In this case, the corresponding author, when submitting an article for consideration to the journal, must indicate the name of the group and its members who take responsibility for the content of the article as authors.

In the process of indexing such article, the authorship is established in the following way:

  • 1) if the name of a research group is indicated as the author of an article, but a note is made next to it that identifies specific members of such a large research group as authors, in the process of indexing the article the authorship will be indicated for each member, same as in articles with a small team of authors. In addition, at the end of the article, in the Acknowledgments section, other individual members of the research team may also be identified as contributors rather than authors;
  • 2) if the name of a research group is indicated as the author of the article, but no notes are made near it, the authorship will be indicated by the name of the group without specifying its specific members during the indexing process. In this case, at the end of the article, in the Acknowledgments section, individual members of the research team should be identified, who are not considered authors but contributors.

In the section “Instruction for authors” on the journal website, you can find out what detailed information about authors should be stated in the article body.

Specification of contributor roles

Contributorship is a process that accompanies obtaining scientific results by the authors. It is fully applicable to research articles but rarely to theoretical or observational ones. Contributorship may take various forms, such as intellectual (ideas, writing), practical (data analysis, conducting research), financial (funds). Individuals or institutions that participated in the research preparation must be mentioned in the article.

The Editorial Board follows the СОРЕ principles and recommendations regarding authorship and contributorship.

We have been using the CRediT taxonomy to identify each author’s contribution to an article, thus avoiding potential authorship conflicts (the HEM journal – since May 2020; the BEL, SEC, FMIR journals – since January 2022).

The defined roles of each author identify his contribution to the research. As all researches differ in content and complexity, the list of performed roles is variable (there can be different roles among authors). Some authors may perform several roles simultaneously in conducting their research and preparing the article.

When submitting an article, the corresponding author should define roles of each author. Authors are mutually responsible for their role distribution. They must confirm the assigned roles and acknowledgements to others in a Cover Letter. The individual contribution of each author will be indicated in the Author Contributions manuscript section.

In the Acknowledgement article section, corresponding author should also specify individuals or institutions who have also contributed to the article but are not its authors. All acknowledged individuals should agree to be acknowledged. Besides, an editor may ask the corresponding author to provide the written consent from all acknowledged individuals for being mentioned in the Acknowledgement. This section should also include the use of artificial intelligence to assist in writing the article.

Author contributions may be marked in the following way (an example):

  • Conceptualisation: He Shuquan, Sora Ju.
  • Data curation: He Shuquan.
  • Formal analysis: Sora Ju.
  • Investigation: He Shuquan, Sora Ju.
  • Methodology: He Shuquan.
  • Project administration: He Shuquan, Sora Ju.
  • Supervision: He Shuquan, Sora Ju.
  • Validation: He Shuquan, Sora Ju.
  • Visualisation: He Shuquan, Sora Ju.
  • Writing – original draft: He Shuquan.
  • Writing – review & editing: He Shuquan.

According to CRediT, contributors’ roles are defined as follows:

  1. Conceptualisation: Ideas; formulation or evolution of research goals and aims.
  2. Data curation: Management activities to annotate (produce metadata), scrub and maintain research data (including software code for interpreting the data itself).
  3. Formal analysis: Application of statistical, mathematical, computational or other formal techniques to analyse or synthesise study data.
  4. Funding acquisition: Acquisition of financial project support.
  5. Investigation: Conducting research, performing experiments, collecting data.
  6. Methodology: Development or design of methodology; creation of models.
  7. Project administration: Management and coordination responsibility for the research activity planning and implementing.
  8. Resources: Provision of study materials, reagents, materials, laboratory samples, computing resources, other analysis tools.
  9. Software: Programming, software development; designing computer programs; implementation of computer code and supporting algorithms; testing of existing code components.
  10. Supervision: Leadership responsibility for the research activity planning and implementing.
  11. Validation: Verification of the overall research.
  12. Visualisation: Preparation, creation and presentation of the published work.
  13. Writing – original draft: Preparation, creation and presentation of the published work, specifically writing the initial draft.
  14. Writing – review & editing: Preparation, creation and presentation of the published work by those from the original research group (critical review, commentary or revision for pre- or post-publication stages).

Technologies using artificial intelligence (AI)

When submitting an article to the journal, authors should indicate whether they have used artificial intelligence (AI) technologies (e.g., large language models [LLMs], chatbots, or image-generating programs) in writing the manuscript. Authors who use such technologies should describe, both in the cover letter and in the submitted paper, how they used them. For example, if AI was used to assist in writing the paper, this should be indicated in the Acknowledgments section. If AI was used for data collection, analysis, or figure generation, the authors should describe this in the Methodology and Research Methods section.