Last updated: 19 November 2021

To qualify for authorship, an individual must meet the following three criteria:

1. Contribute significantly to at least two of the following aspects:
   • a. study design or conception of the work
   • b. data acquisition, analysis, or interpretation
   • c. drafting the work or revising it critically (in terms of intellectual content, not simply language correction)
2. Approve the version submitted to the journal and the final version to be published
3. Agree to be accountable for appropriate parts of the work and have confidence in the integrity of the entire work

Individuals who contributed to the work but do not meet all three of the above criteria should be acknowledged.

Group authorship

Listings of groups of authors (e.g. committees, working groups, project collaborations, volunteer groups, institutions, etc.) under a group name are not accepted in Inter-Research publications. Everyone qualifying for authorship should be listed individually in the list of authors. The reasons for this policy are:

1. Listing a group as author is imprecise over time, because the composition of most groups changes as members leave or join, leading to the group name not representing the actual group of authors of an article post-publication. With these changes, the group no longer fulfils the accountability and integrity requirement of authorship.
2. Listing the group name instead of the names of each individual in that group is not transparent and does not allow those individuals to take credit for the publication.
3. Individual authors must be listed to allow the identification of any real or perceived conflicts of interest during the review process (e.g. with editors or reviewers).
4. Fundamental moral and proprietary rights in literary works are legally defined to protect authors who are natural persons.
5. There is no practical advantage to listing a group-author name instead of the names of each individual that qualifies for authorship; Inter-Research publications can accommodate long lists of authors and indicate equal authorship of multiple authors where necessary.

Changes in author listings

Author lists should be complete at the time of submission. All authors listed on the manuscript must be entered in the correct order during the online submission process. Changes in authorship after submission (including after acceptance or after publication) must be brought to the attention of the Managing Editor or Editorial Assistant of the journal via email (see each journal’s ‘Editors’ website for contact details), quoting the manuscript ID number, manuscript title and author list, and providing justification for the change in authorship.

Inter-Research reserves the right to deny requests for authorship change(s) in case of insufficient justification. In case of acceptable changes to the authorship listing, all co-authors and the author(s) to be added or removed will be required to approve the change via email.