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Policies

Authorship Criteria

Authorship

The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals (ICMJE Recommendations 2018) recommend that authorship be 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.

In addition to being accountable for the parts of the work he or she has done, an author should be able to identify which co-authors are responsible for specific other parts of the work. In addition, authors should have confidence in the integrity of the contributions of their co-authors.

We include only one corresponding author per article. Any further contribution details (e.g., equal contribution) must be included in the contributors or acknowledgment sections at the end of the article.

Muthanna Medical Journal requires that all those designated as authors should meet all four ICMJE criteria for authorship, and all who meet the four criteria should be identified as authors. We recognize only natural persons over 18 years of age as authors. These authorship criteria are intended to reserve the status of authorship for those who deserve credit and can take responsibility for the work. The criteria are not intended for use as a means to disqualify colleagues from authorship who otherwise meet authorship criteria by denying them the opportunity to meet criterion #s 2 or 3. Therefore, all individuals who meet the first criterion should have the opportunity to participate in the review, drafting, and final approval of the manuscript.

The individuals who conduct the work are responsible for identifying who meets these criteria and ideally should do so when planning the work, making modifications as appropriate as the work progresses. The corresponding author takes primary responsibility for communication with the journal during the manuscript submission, peer review, and publication process, and typically ensures that all the journal’s administrative requirements, such as providing details of authorship, ethics committee approval, clinical trial registration documentation, and gathering conflict of interest forms and statements, are properly completed, although these duties may be delegated to one or more co-authors.

When a large multi-author group has conducted the work, the group ideally should decide who will be an author before the work is started and confirm who is an author before submitting the manuscript for publication. All members of the group named as authors should meet all four criteria for authorship, including approval of the final manuscript, and they should be able to take public responsibility for the work and should have full confidence in the accuracy and integrity of the work of other group authors. They will also be expected as individuals to complete conflict-of-interest disclosure forms.

The byline of the article identifies who is directly responsible for the manuscript, and Medline lists as authors whichever names appear on the byline. If the byline includes a group name, Medline will list the names of individual group members who are authors or who are collaborators, sometimes called non-author contributors, if there is a note associated with the byline clearly stating that the individual names are elsewhere in the paper and whether those names are authors or collaborators.

At Muthanna Medical Journal we want authors to assure us that all authors included on a paper fulfil the criteria of authorship. In addition we want assurance that there is no one else who fulfils the criteria but has not been included as an author.

Contributorship

The Muthanna Medical Journal lists contributors in two ways. Firstly, we publish a list of authors’ names at the beginning of the paper and, secondly, we list contributors (some of whom may not be included as authors) at the end of the paper, giving details of who did what in planning, conducting, and reporting the work. This is a good place to include contributions by patients or members of the public who have assisted as research volunteers, giving their names and specific roles. We encourage authors to fully acknowledge the contribution of patients and the public to their research where appropriate.

One or more of these contributors are listed as guarantors of the paper. The guarantor accepts full responsibility for the work and/or the conduct of the study, had access to the data, and controlled the decision to publish. See Maintaining the integrity of the scientific record.

Contributorship and guarantorship are concepts that were applied first to original research papers and are sometimes hard to define for other articles. Each contributorship statement should make clear who has contributed what to the planning, conduct, and reporting of the work described in the article, and should identify one, or occasionally more, contributor(s) as being responsible for the overall content as guarantor(s). For articles in Muthanna Medical Journal that do not report original research – such as editorials, clinical reviews, and education and debate – please state who had the idea for the article, who performed the literature search, who wrote the article, and who is the guarantor (the contributor who accepts full responsibility for the finished article, had access to any data, and controlled the decision to publish). For non-research articles that include case reports such as lessons of the week, drug points, and interactive case reports, please also state who identified and/or managed the case(s).

Researchers must determine among themselves the precise nature of each person’s contribution, and we encourage open discussion among all participants. See Authorship is dying; long live contributorship.

Alteration to Authorship or Contributorship

Any change in authors and/or contributors after initial submission must be approved by all authors. This applies to additions, deletions, change of order to the authors, or contributions being attributed differently. Any alterations must be explained to the editor. The editor may contact any of the authors and/or contributors to ascertain whether they have agreed to any alteration.

Group Authorship

If there is a very large number of authors, we may ask for confirmation that everyone listed met the ICMJE criteria for authorship. If they did, we may then require that the authors form a group whose name will appear in the article byline.

Copyright and Licensing

Copyright

Muthanna Medical Journal (MMJ) is published Open Access. This means all articles are immediately available free-of-charge upon publication. Articles in Muthanna Medical Journal (MMJ) can be downloaded, shared, and reused without restriction, as long as the original authors are properly cited. Copyright for open access articles in Muthanna Medical Journal (MMJ) is retained by the author(s).

License

By ‘open access’ to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself.

All articles are freely available and immediately accessible online upon publication. Readers can study, download, and/or print OPEN access articles without any cost. Articles are licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0) (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode), which permits unrestricted distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided that the work is properly cited.

Disclaimer

The information and opinions presented in the Journal reflect the views of the authors and not of the Journal or its Editorial Board or the Publisher. Publication does not constitute endorsement by the journal.

Cookie Policy

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Conflict of Interest

ICMJE Recommendations

Public trust in the scientific process and the credibility of published articles depend in part on how transparently conflicts of interest are handled during the planning, implementation, writing, peer review, editing, and publication of scientific work. A conflict of interest exists when professional judgment concerning a primary interest (such as patients’ welfare or the validity of research) may be influenced by a secondary interest (such as financial gain). Perceptions of conflict of interest are as important as actual conflicts of interest. Financial relationships (such as employment, consultancies, stock ownership or options, honoraria, patents, and paid expert testimony) are the most easily identifiable conflicts of interest and the most likely to undermine the credibility of the journal, the authors, and of science itself. However, conflicts can occur for other reasons, such as personal relationships or rivalries, academic competition, and intellectual beliefs. Authors should avoid entering into agreements with study sponsors, both for-profit and nonprofit, that interfere with authors’ access to all of the study’s data or that interfere with their ability to analyze and interpret the data and to prepare and publish manuscripts independently when and where they choose.

1. Participants

All participants in the peer-review and publication process—not only authors but also peer reviewers, editors, and editorial board members of journals—must consider their conflicts of interest when fulfilling their roles in the process of article review and publication and must disclose all relationships that could be viewed as potential conflicts of interest.

a. Authors

When authors submit a manuscript of any type or format, they are responsible for disclosing all financial and personal relationships that might bias or be seen to bias their work. The ICMJE has developed a Form for Disclosure of Conflicts of Interest to facilitate and standardize authors’ disclosures. ICMJE member journals require that authors use this form, and ICMJE encourages other journals to adopt it.

b. Peer Reviewers

Reviewers should be asked at the time they are asked to critique a manuscript if they have conflicts of interest that could complicate their review. Reviewers must disclose to editors any conflicts of interest that could bias their opinions of the manuscript and should recuse themselves from reviewing specific manuscripts if the potential for bias exists. Reviewers must not use knowledge of the work they’re reviewing before its publication to further their own interests.

c. Editors and Journal Staff

Editors who make final decisions about manuscripts should recuse themselves from editorial decisions if they have conflicts of interest or relationships that pose potential conflicts related to articles under consideration. Other editorial staff members who participate in editorial decisions must provide editors with a current description of their financial interests or other conflicts (as they might relate to editorial judgments) and recuse themselves from any decisions in which a conflict of interest exists. Editorial staff must not use information gained through working with manuscripts for private gain. Editors should publish regular disclosure statements about potential conflicts of interests related to the commitments of journal staff. Guest editors should follow these same procedures.

2. Reporting Conflicts of Interest

Articles should be published with statements or supporting documents, such as the ICMJE conflict of interest form, declaring: – Authors’ conflicts of interest; and – Sources of support for the work, including sponsor names along with explanations of the role of those sources if any in study design; collection, analysis, and interpretation of data; writing of the report; the decision to submit the report for publication; or a statement declaring that the supporting source had no such involvement; and – Whether the authors had access to the study data, with an explanation of the nature and extent of access, including whether access is on-going. To support the above statements, editors may request that authors of a study sponsored by a funder with a proprietary or financial interest in the outcome sign a statement, such as “I had full access to all of the data in this study and I take complete responsibility for the integrity of the data and the accuracy of the data analysis.”

Protection of Human Subjects and Animals in Research Policy

When reporting experiments on human subjects, authors should indicate whether the procedures followed were in accordance with the ethical standards of the responsible committee on human experimentation (institutional and national) and with the Helsinki Declaration of 1975, as revised in 2000 (5). If doubt exists whether the research was conducted in accordance with the Helsinki Declaration, the authors must explain the rationale for their approach and demonstrate that the institutional review body explicitly approved the doubtful aspects of the study. When reporting experiments on animals, authors should indicate whether the institutional and national guide for the care and use of laboratory animals was followed. [International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (“Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals”) February 2006]

Article Withdrawal

Muthanna Medical Journal follows the recommendations of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) regarding corrections, retractions, republications, and version control. The Editor-in-Chief of the journal is solely responsible for the contents and records of the journal and is the highest authority to take decisions on withdrawal policies.

Up-Dated ICMJE Recommendations (December 2021)

If a correction is needed, journals should follow these minimum standards:

  • The journal should publish a correction notice as soon as possible detailing changes from and citing the original publication; the correction should be on an electronic or numbered print page that is included in an electronic or print Table of Contents to ensure proper indexing.
  • The journal also should post a new article version with details of the changes from the original version and the date(s) on which the changes were made.
  • The journal should archive all prior versions of the article. This archive can be either directly accessible to readers or can be made available to the reader on request.
  • Previous electronic versions should prominently note that there are more recent versions of the article.
  • The citation should be to the most recent version.

Pervasive errors can result from a coding problem or a miscalculation and may result in extensive inaccuracies throughout an article. If such errors do not change the direction or significance of the results, interpretations, and conclusions of the article, a correction should be published that follows the minimum standards noted above.

Errors serious enough to invalidate a paper’s results and conclusions may require retraction. However, retraction with republication (also referred to as “replacement”) can be considered in cases where honest error (e.g., a misclassification or miscalculation) leads to a major change in the direction or significance of the results, interpretations, and conclusions. If the error is judged to be unintentional, the underlying science appears valid, and the changed version of the paper survives further review and editorial scrutiny, then retraction with republication of the changed paper, with an explanation, allows full correction of the scientific literature. In such cases, it is helpful to show the extent of the changes in supplementary material or in an appendix, for complete transparency.