Author's Statements
- Details
Acknowledgments (if applicable)
The acknowledgement section can be used to thank anyone important in the paper who does not qualify for authorship and to declare relevant funding information. The acknowledgement section should not be used to list contributors who meet criteria of authorship. Authors must ensure that anyone named in the acknowledgments agrees to being so named.
The section should also not be used to declare conflicts of interests, including any related to funding sources that may gain or lose financially through this publication. These should be declared separately in a conflict of interest statement. Please refer to the conflict of interest policy for more information.
When acknowledging funding, our recommended best practice is that authors should acknowledge funders and grants on publications when the activities that contributed to that publication:
- are within scope of the acknowledged grant and
- arise directly from a specific grant
The following questions can be used to determine if the activities arise from a specific grant:
- Are the results included in the publication original and the direct result of experimentation, materials or analysis supported by the grant?
- Does the grant financially support publication of the manuscript ?
If the answer is yes to any of these questions, best practice is to acknowledge the funding source and grant number, if the grant requires it. By contrast, if the answer is no to these questions, it is not best practice to acknowledge grant support. In particular, grants that support data generation for distinct studies that are related in topic but that are not relevant for this specific publication should not be acknowledged. Please ensure that relevant funding sources are disclosed for all authors. Authors should also ensure they are aware of any specific acknowledgement requirements from their funders.
An appropriate format for acknowledgement of grant funding is:
A.B.C. discloses support for the research of this work from Funder [grant number xxxx], Funder [grant number xxxx] and Funder [grant number xxxx]. D.E.F. discloses support for publication of this work from Funder [grant number xxxx], Funder [grant number xxxx] and Funder [grant number xxxx].
Funding information (obligatory)
This section should describe sources of funding that have supported the work. Authors should state how the research described in their article was funded, including grant numbers if applicable. If there is no funding involved, the following (or similar) statement should be included:
Funding information: The authors state no funding involved.
Author contribution (obligatory)
To recognize every author’s contribution to a research paper, reduce authorship disputes and facilitate collaboration, we encourage authors to include a statement in the manuscript that shares and accurately describes the contribution of each author.
For multi-authored publications, authors should add an "Author contribution" section. This section should contain the following information:
a) Acknowledgment that all authors accepted the responsibility for the content of the manuscript and consented to its submission, reviewed all the results, and approved the final version of the manuscript.
b) Brief description of the contribution of all co-authors, with the authors referred to using their initials.
If required by the funding bodies, the authors may add the information describing the degree of each author contribution.
Example:
Author contribution: All authors have accepted responsibility for the entire content of this manuscript and consented to its submission to the journal, reviewed all the results and approved the final version of the manuscript. AB and CD designed the experiments and EF carried them out. GH developed the model code and performed the simulations. IJ prepared the manuscript with contributions from all co-authors.
For single-authored publications, authors should add an "Author contribution" section stating they confirm the sole responsibility for the conception of the study, presented results and manuscript preparation.
Example:
Author contribution: The author confirms the sole responsibility for the conception of the study, presented results and manuscript preparation.
Conflict of interest (obligatory)
To ensure fair and objective decision-making, authors must declare any associations that pose a conflict of interest (financial, personal or professional) in connection with evaluated manuscripts. Non-financial competing interests include a declaration of political, personal, religious, ideological, academic, and intellectual competing interests. Authors from pharmaceutical companies, or other commercial organizations that sponsor clinical trials, should declare these as competing interests on submission.
If there is a conflict of interest, the following (or similar) Author’s Statement (including appropriate information) should be included before the References (or at the end of the Acknowledgments section):
Conflict of interest: Author A.A. is a member of Committee BBBB. Author A.A. owns shares of Company Y mentioned in the article.
If there are no conflicts of interest, the following Author’s Statement should be included before the References (or at the end of the Acknowledgments section):
Conflict of interest: The authors state no conflict of interest.
Data availability statements (if applicable)
In accordance with our data sharing policy, the final manuscript that reports results derived from research data must include a Data Availability Statement. The provision of a Data Availability Statement will be verified as a condition of publication. The Data Availability Statement should include information on where data supporting the results reported in the article can be found, including, where applicable, hyperlinks to publicly archived datasets analysed or generated during the study. Where research data are not publicly available, this must be stated in the manuscript along with any conditions for accessing the data.
Data availability statement should be included before the References (or at the end of the Acknowledgments section) after the Author’s Statement.
Data availability statements can take one of the following forms (or a combination of more than one if required for multiple types of research data):
a) The datasets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are available in the [NAME] repository, [PERSISTENT WEB LINK TO DATASETS]
b) The datasets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
c) Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no datasets were generated or analysed during the current study.
d) All data generated or analysed during this study are included in this published article [and its supplementary information files].
e) The data that support the findings of this study are available from [third party name] but restrictions apply to the availability of these data, which were used under license for the current study, and so are not publicly available. Data are however available from the authors upon reasonable request and with permission of [third party name].