AUTHORSHIP POLICY (following ICMJE guidelines)
Group members who have made substantive intellectual contributions to a paper are given credit as authors.
In a large multi-authored group, all members of the group named as authors should meet the following criteria:
- Sincere, persistent, Intellectual and level best contribution to the conception or design of the work; or being expert in Quantitative and Qualitative data collection, data analysis, data entry or interpretation of data for the work. Full involvement in study with learning, understanding and execution are required.
- Drafting the work or revising it critically for important intellectual content.
- Final approval of the version to be published.
- 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.
- It is the collective responsibility of Principal Investigator (PI) and the Head of the Research & Development Cell (R&D Cell) to scrutinize and determine about the active participation of all the Research Investigators in the study to fulfill the criteria of authorship.
- Principal Investigator is supposed to assess and make the modifications as appropriate time to time on the basis of contribution of Investigators as per assigned responsibility, once the work progresses. For the same he/ she may take feedback from the entire project team. He/ she should have confidence in the integrity of the contributions of each and every Investigators of Project team to be the co-author in the multi-authored group projects.
- After exemplary contribution since beginning, if any team member of the research project leaves the organization due to some genuine reason before completion of study, he/ she may be included in the authorship, as per the final decision of Head of the Institution and Head of the R & D Cell.
The criteria used to determine the order in which authors will be enlisted in research paper:
- For multi-authored research Projects the general order for authors shall be Principal Investigator, Co-Principal Investigator(s), Co-Investigator(s) and experts. If there is multiple publications developed under single Project, then by-line may vary and to be decided collectively by the author group with the consent of Principal Investigator and Head, R& D cell.
- For Collaborative research, we need to consider the other party’s opinion for same.
- For Grant-in-aid research we need to follow the Sponsor Organization guidelines regarding authorship.
- Some Journals enquire and publish information about the contributions of each person at least for original research, where role and contribution of every author must be defined before the submission. In such cases Publisher may find the contribution is not valuable/ significant (as per the guidelines of the Journal) and denies authorship to any author from the group and R & D Cell may not be responsible for the same.
Corresponding Author:
- The corresponding author is the one individual who takes primary responsibility for communication with the Journal during the manuscript submission, Peer review and publication process. For In-house research Projects, PI will be the corresponding author.
- The corresponding author needs to be available throughout the submission and Peer review process to respond to editorial queries in a timely way and subsequently after publication to respond to critiques of the work and cooperate with any requests from the journal for data or additional information asked for, even after publication.
- During the entire review process, all the authors are required to contribute with the corresponding author. There may be retraction of the name from authorship may cause, if dissatisfactory response is observed.
Acknowledgement:
- Those team members who do not meet criteria for authorship mentioned above or rendered partial contribution, would not be enlisted as authors, but their work will be acknowledged.
- Acknowledgement should be explained and specified. Insignificant contribution may not be considered even under Acknowledgement, which will be decided by the PI, Head, R & D and Head of the Institution.
- Following activities may be considered under acknowledgement:
- Acquisition of funding, general supervision, writing assistance, Technical editing, Language editing, Proof-reading etc.
