Authorship

1. Who qualifies as an author

Authorship requires all four of the following conditions. Meeting only some of them does not confer authorship.

1. Substantial contribution to the conception or design of the work, or to the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of the data;
2. drafting the work or revising it critically for important intellectual content;
3. final approval of the version to be published;
4. agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work, including the integrity and accuracy of every part of it, and willingness to help resolve questions raised after publication.

Every author must be able to identify which co-authors are responsible for which parts of the work, and must have confidence in the integrity of their co-authors’ contributions.

2. Who does not qualify

Contributions that do not meet all four criteria are recognised in the Acknowledgements, with the nature of the contribution stated and the written permission of the person named. These commonly include:

• acquisition of funding alone;
• general supervision of a research group or department, or holding a senior position alone;
• provision of patients, materials, specimens, equipment, or facilities alone;
• routine technical assistance, data entry, or data collection alone;
• language editing, statistical consultation, or medical writing assistance alone, which must additionally be disclosed by name and affiliation.

3. Contributor roles

Every submission must include a contributorship statement that names what each author did, using the CRediT taxonomy where applicable — conceptualization, methodology, software, validation, formal analysis, investigation, resources, data curation, writing (original draft), writing (review and editing), visualization, supervision, project administration, and funding acquisition. The statement is published with the article.

4. Corresponding author

One author is designated corresponding author. That author:

• confirms that every listed author meets the criteria in section 1 and that no qualifying contributor has been omitted;
• confirms that all authors have seen and approved the submitted version and any revision;
• is responsible for communication with the journal during review, revision, and production, and for the accuracy of the galley proof;
• remains available to respond to queries after publication, including requests for data or clarification;
• ensures that declarations of funding, competing interests, ethics approval, consent, and data availability are complete and accurate.

5. Author identity and affiliation

For each author the submission must state the full name as the author wishes it to be cited, the institutional affiliation held at the time the work was carried out, the country, and an active ORCID iD. Authors with a joint appointment list each institution. A job title or employment status — for example “resident”, “staff”, or “consultant” — is not part of an affiliation and should not be entered in the affiliation field.

Authors are asked to write their name and affiliation consistently across all their JACR articles, using the same spelling of the department, institution, and city each time. Consistent author metadata is a condition of accurate indexing, citation matching, and national accreditation assessment; the editorial office may standardise the wording of an affiliation, with the author’s agreement, where the same institution has been written in different ways.

6. Changes to authorship

Before acceptance

A request to add, remove, or reorder authors must come from the corresponding author and must state the reason for the change and the contribution that justifies it, accompanied by the written agreement of every author, including the author being added or removed. The editor may ask for further evidence and may decline a change that is not substantiated.

After acceptance or publication

Changes after acceptance are exceptional. Where a change is justified, it is made through a published corrigendum that states what changed and why, so that the record remains transparent. Authorship is never changed silently.

7. Group and collaborative authorship

Where a study is conducted by a group, the submission must state whether authorship is attributed to the group name, to named individuals on behalf of the group, or to both. Individuals credited as authors must each meet the four criteria; other members of the group are listed in the Acknowledgements. The corresponding author provides the full membership list for publication.

8. Deceased or incapacitated authors

An author who qualified for authorship but has died or become incapacitated before submission remains listed, with a footnote recording this. The corresponding author confirms the contribution and, where possible, obtains the agreement of the next of kin or the institution.

9. Artificial intelligence cannot be an author

Generative-AI tools, large language models, and chatbots cannot be listed as authors or co-authors, because they cannot consent to submission, approve the final version, or take responsibility for the work. Material use of such tools in preparing the manuscript must be disclosed in the methods or acknowledgements, naming the tool and how it was used. The authors remain fully responsible for everything in the manuscript. See the AI Tools Policy.

10. Prohibited authorship practices

• Gift or honorary authorship — listing a person who did not meet the criteria, as a courtesy or because of seniority.
• Guest authorship — adding a well-known name to improve the prospects of acceptance.
• Ghost authorship — omitting a person who did meet the criteria, including an undisclosed professional writer.
• Trading in authorship — offering, buying, or selling authorship, or obtaining a manuscript from a paper mill.
• Adding or removing authors without the agreement of all authors.

Any of these is treated as misconduct under the Publication Ethics policy and may lead to rejection, correction, retraction, or notification of the authors’ institutions.

11. Authorship disputes

JACR is not the competent body to adjudicate a dispute about who contributed what. Where a dispute arises, the editor suspends processing of the manuscript, or publishes an expression of concern if the article is already published, and refers the matter to the institutions of the authors concerned. The journal acts on the published record once the institutions have reached a conclusion, following the applicable COPE flowchart. Authors are asked to resolve authorship among themselves before submission.

12. Declaration at submission

By submitting to JACR, the corresponding author declares on behalf of all authors that the authorship list is complete and correct, that every listed author meets the four criteria, that all authors have approved the submission, that the work is not under consideration elsewhere, and that all competing interests and funding sources have been declared.

This page is read together with the Publication Ethics, Peer Review Policy, and Author Guidelines policies, and follows the ICMJE Recommendations and the COPE Core Practices.