When defining authors and authorship, Authorship and Authorship Responsibilities proposed by the Council of Science Editors (CSE) and Defining the Role of Authors and Contributors, determined by International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) are taken into account.

According to the Publishing policy of the journal Health Economics and Management Review and following the COPE principles, an author (the co-author) of the manuscript is the a person who either owns an idea or develops and implements research through the dissemination of intellectual and creative works. The author is a person who performed the research and did not violate the copyright and other authors’ rights.

The Editorial Board organizes trusting relationships with authors based on their acceptance of the publication ethics standards, Publishing and Editorial policy, and Instructions for authors. Moreover, it means that the author must demonstrate only own unique ideas and research results in his/her article, does not submit the paper to several journals at once, does not borrow other authors’ ideas while preparing the research, and does not use reviewers for improving the quality of the article to submit it to another journal.

According to the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors Recommendations (ICMJE Recommendations 2019), the authorship is based on 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.

Contributors who meet fewer than all 4 of the above criteria for authorship should not be listed as authors, but they should be acknowledged”.

The Editorial team of the HEM journal requires that all individuals named authors meet all four of the ICMJE’s authorship criteria. Moreover, his/her personal contribution to writing the article and conducting the research is determined for each author. No one else can claim authorship except the real authors.

When submitting the article to the HEM journal, all persons who have 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 at the end of the manuscript;
• at the end of the manuscript, one can mention people who have not made a significant contribution to the results of the research, but whose participation, advice or help were important in the implementation of the research;
• persons who supported the funding of the research results are mentioned at the end of the article with the disclosure of the funding source.

Each article with several authors has a corresponding author (name/surname and e-mail indicated in the Cover Letter), who communicates with the journal’s editors and controls the processing of the article. The corresponding author has the right to communicate with the Editorial Board of the journal on behalf of the entire author team, for example, to express disagreement with the reviewers or to declare the withdrawal of the article. The Managing Editor sends copies of the letters to all co-authors during communication with the corresponding author to avoid misunderstandings within the author’s team, as well as between the editors and the authors.

If there are any changes in team of co-authors, the person who is excluded or added must give his/her consent in the letter to the journal staff. Then, the Managing Editor will send for signing a new Cover letter.

If the research (complexity and the scientific results) is poorly correlated with the number of co-authors, the editorial staff may ask the author’s team to provide detailed information regarding the contribution of each of the co-authors to the research and the article preparation.

Specification of contributor roles

Contributorship is a process accompanying the obtaining of scientific results by the authors of the manuscript. It is fully applicable to research articles and very rarely to theoretical articles and those of observational nature. Contributorship may take various forms. They can be intellectual (ideas, writing), practical (data analysis, conducting research), financial (funds). Individuals or institutions that participated in the research preparation must be mentioned at the end of the article.

The Editorial Board of HEM journal follows the СОРЕ principles and recommendations in aspects of authorship and contributorship.

Health Economics and Management Review journal uses the CRediT taxonomy since January 2020 to identify each author’s own contribution to an article to avoid potential authorship disputes and conflicts. When submitting an article, the corresponding author should define the role of each author. Authors are mutually responsible for their role distribution. They must confirm the assigned roles and Acknowledgements in the Cover Letter. The author’s individual contribution will be indicated in the manuscript in the Author Contributions section.

Author contributions may be marked as follows (as an example):

• Conceptualization: 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.
• Visualization: He Shuquan, Sora Ju.
• Writing – original draft: He Shuquan.
• Writing – review & editing: He Shuquan.

According to CRediT – Contributor Roles Taxonomy, contributors’ roles are defined as follows:

1. Conceptualization – Ideas; formulation or evolution of overarching research goals and aims.
2. 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.
3. Formal analysis – Application of statistical, mathematical, computational, or other formal techniques to analyze or synthesize study data.
4. Funding acquisition – Acquisition of the financial support for the project leading to this publication.
5. Investigation – Conducting a research and investigation process, specifically performing the experiments, or data/evidence collection.
6. Methodology – Development or design of methodology; creation of models.
7. Project administration – Management and coordination responsibility for the research activity planning and execution.
8. Resources – Provision of study materials, reagents, materials, laboratory samples, instrumentation, computing resources, or other analysis tools.
9. Software – Programming, software development; designing computer programs; implementation of the computer code and supporting algorithms; testing of existing code components.
10. Supervision – Oversight and leadership responsibility for the research activity planning and execution, including mentorship external to the core team.
11. Validation – Verification (as a part of the research or separate activity) of the overall replication/reproducibility of results/experiments and other research outputs.
12. Visualization – Preparation, creation and/or presentation of the published work, specifically visualization/data presentation.
13. Writing – original draft – Preparation, creation and/or presentation of the published work, specifically writing the initial draft (including substantive translation).
14. 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.