Authorship, contributions, and artificial intelligence

Authorship criteria

All authors must make a substantial intellectual contribution, approve the submitted and final versions, accept responsibility for their contribution, disclose conflicts, and provide genuine affiliation, country, and email details. ORCID is recorded only when it belongs to the person and can be verified.

CRediT

Where appropriate, contributions are reported as conceptualization, data curation, formal analysis, funding acquisition, investigation, methodology, project administration, resources, software, supervision, validation, visualization, writing—original draft, and writing—review and editing.

Honorary, hierarchical, purchased, or ghost authorship; inclusion without contribution; and exclusion of eligible contributors are prohibited. Post-submission changes require a written request, justification, and approval from everyone concerned before acceptance.

Artificial intelligence for authors

Generative AI may support language, style, translation, preliminary organization, code, or exploratory analysis when outputs are validated. It cannot be an author, replace responsibility, invent sources or data, fabricate findings, manipulate images, process confidential information without authorization, conceal plagiarism, or produce unverified claims.

Substantial use must disclose the tool, provider or version where relevant, purpose, stage, extent, and human verification. Ordinary spelling functions that do not materially alter content need not be disclosed.

Reviewers and editors

They must not upload confidential manuscripts to external tools without authorization and adequate safeguards. Decisions are not automated without human oversight, and all AI output must be critically reviewed.