Authorship Regulation


AUTHORSHIP POLICY


  • Group members who have made substantive intellectual contributions to a paper are given credit as authors.

Following The ICMJE guidelines, it is decided that authorship should be based on following criteria:

  1. Sincere, persistent, Intellectual and level best contribution to the conception or design of the work; or the being expert in Quantitative and Qualitative in data collection, data analysis, data entry, or interpretation of data for the work, Full involvement and learning, understanding and execution.
  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 in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.
  • In a large multi-author group, all members of the group named as authors should meet all above four criteria for authorship. It is the collective responsibility of the authors to determine that all people named as authors meet these criteria.

    The Head of the Institution and Chairperson R&D Cell after discussing with the active participant of the Project team and research Project co-ordinators shall decide who meets these criteria (making modifications as appropriate as the work progresses).
  • The principal investigator after discussing with Co-I shall identify which co-authors are responsible for specific parts of the work and will have confidence in the integrity of the contributions of the co-authors.
  • Any team member of the research project work, who left the work in between due to some genuine reason, after exemplary contribution, may be included in the authorship, as per the final decision of Head of the Institution and Chairperson, R & D Cell.

The criteria used to determine the order in which authors are listed :

  1. For R&D cell, In-house research Projects the general order for authors shall be PI, co-PI, Co-Investigators and experts (excluding PG/UG STSH Policy). This is the general order. But if multiple publications are developed under single Project, then by-line may vary and are to be decided collectively by the author group with the consent of Chairperson, R& D cell and Head of the Institution.
  2. For collaborative research, we need to consider the other party’s opinion for same.
  3. For Grant-in-aid research we need to follow the Sponsor Organization guidelines regarding authorship.
  • Some journals request and publish information about the contributions of each person at least for original research where role of the author must be defined before submission. Contributions of each author will be sent for the same. If publisher finds that the contribution is not valuable/significant (as per the guidelines of the journal) and denies authorship to that individual, then R & D cell may not be held responsible.

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. In In-house research Projects, PI is the corresponding author.
  • The corresponding author should be available throughout the submission and peer review process to respond to editorial queries in a timely way and should be available after publication to respond to critiques of the work and cooperate with any requests from the journal for data or additional information should questions about the paper arise after publication.
  • During the entire review process, all the authors are required to contribute to the corresponding author. Dissatisfactory response/work may retract the name of the individual from authorship.

Acknowledgement:

  • Those team members who do not meet criteria for authorship mentioned above, should not be listed as authors, but they should be acknowledged.
  • Acknowledgement should be explained and specified. No remarkable contribution even being part of the research Project, may not be considered under acknowledgement or authorship either, which will be decided by the Head of the Institution and Chairperson, R & D.
  • Following activities that may be considered under acknowledgement are:
  • Acquisition of funding
  • General supervision
  • Writing assistance
  • Technical editing
  • Language editing
  • Proof-reading, etc.