Authorship Criteria

Authorship credit should be based only on substantial contributions to each of the three components mentioned below: 

  1. Concept and design of study or acquisition of data or analysis and interpretation of data;
  2. Drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content; and
  3. Final approval of the version to be published.

Participation solely in the acquisition of funding or the collection of data does not justify authorship. General supervision of the research group is not sufficient for authorship. Each contributor should have participated sufficiently in the work to take public responsibility for appropriate portions of the content of the manuscript. The order of naming the contributors should be based on the relative contribution of the contributor towards the study and writing the manuscript. Once submitted the order cannot be changed without the written consent of all the contributors. The journal prescribes a maximum number of authors for manuscripts depending upon the type of manuscript, its scope, and the number of institutions involved (vide infra). The authors should provide a justification if the number of authors exceeds these limits.

Contribution Details

Contributors should provide a description of contributions made by each of them towards the manuscript. The description should be divided into the following categories, as applicable: concept, design, the definition of intellectual content, literature search, clinical studies, experimental studies, data acquisition, data analysis, statistical analysis, manuscript preparation, manuscript editing, and manuscript review. One or more authors should take responsibility for the integrity of the work as a whole from inception to published article and should be designated as ‘guarantor’. 

Conflicts of Interest / Competing Interests

All authors must disclose any and all conflicts of interest they may have with the publication of the manuscript or an institution or product that is mentioned in the manuscript and/or is important to the outcome of the study presented. Authors should also disclose conflict of interest with products that compete with those mentioned in their manuscript.

The author declares that he/she agrees to the editorial revision of the manuscript (including all images, illustrations, etc.). The author should submit their manuscript to this journal with the knowledge that they cannot submit the same manuscript simultaneously to other journals (s) for consideration of publication. If the same is brought to notice (by any source) to journal editors their manuscript stands withdrawn after notifying the corresponding author. Editors retain the right to make any necessary changes to the manuscript after consultation with the author(s). If any case of misconduct will be detected, this will lead to an immediate retraction of the article or in minor cases to a correction in one of the following issues according to the publisher’s guidelines