Authorship Policies

Authorship

According to the ICMJE recommendation, authorship is based on the following four 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 [https://www.icmje.org/recommendations/browse/roles-and-responsibilities/defining-the-role-of-authors-and-contributors.html].

Therefore, all authors should make substantial contributions to all of the followings: (1) the conception and design of the study, or 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 submitted.

Authors’ Agreement Form

It is mandatory that a signed Authors’ Agreement Form be sent along with the proofreading by the Corresponding Author. The authors acknowledge that the publisher has the legal right to take appropriate action against the authors for any violation of the terms and conditions as laid down in the Authors’ Agreement Form.

Authors’ responsibility

As part of the submission process, authors are required to check off their submission's compliance with all of the following items. Submissions may be returned to authors that do not adhere to these guidelines.

1. The submission has not been previously published, and is not under consideration for publication in another journal.
2. The submission file is in OpenOffice, Microsoft Word document file format.
3. The text adheres to the stylistic and bibliographic requirements outlined in the Author Guidelines, which are found in ²About the Journal.²
4. The ORCID ID of the authors or at least the first and the corresponding authors are assigned.
5. One author has been designated as the corresponding author with contact details: E-mail address,  full postal address, phone numbers
6. All necessary parts are considered and the manuscript contains Highlights, Title page, Abstract and Keywords, Running Title, Main manuscript, Figure captions, all figures, all tables.
7. The manuscript has been 'spell-checked' and 'grammar-checked'
8. All references mentioned in the Reference list are cited in the text, and vice versa.  References are in the correct format for this journal.
9.  Permission has been obtained for use of copyrighted material from other sources.
10.  A covering letter with all needed items is prepared