qualify for authorship or to arbitrate authorship conflicts.
If agreement cannot be reached about who qualifies for
authorship, the institution(s) where the work was per-
formed, not the journal editor, should be asked to inves-
tigate. The criteria used to determine the order in which
authors are listed on the byline may vary, and are to be
decided collectively by the author group and not by edi-
tors. If authors request removal or addition of an author
after manuscript submission or publication, journal edi-
tors should seek an explanation and signed statement of
agreement for the requested change from all listed
authors and from the author to be removed or added.
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. The corresponding author typi-
cally ensures that all the journal's administrative require-
ments, such as providing details of authorship, ethics
committee approval, clinical trial registration documen-
tation, and disclosures of relationships and activities, are
properly completed and reported, although these duties
may be delegated to one or more co-authors. The corre-
sponding author should be available throughout the
submission and peer-review process to respond to edi-
torial queries in a timely way, and should be available af-
ter 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. Although the corresponding
author has primary responsibility for correspondence
with the journal, the ICMJE recommends that editors
send copies of all correspondence to all listed 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 indi-
viduals to complete disclosure forms.
Some large multi-author groups designate author-
ship by a group name, with or without the names of indi-
viduals. When submitting a manuscript authored by a
group, the corresponding author should specify the
group name if one exists, and clearly identify the group
members who can take credit and responsibility for the
work as authors. 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 con-
tributors, 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.
3. Non-Author Contributors
Contributors who meet fewer than all 4 of the above
criteria for authorship should not be listed as authors,
but they should be acknowledged. Examples of activities
that alone (without other contributions) do not qualify a
contributor for authorship are acquisition of funding;
general supervision of a research group or general
administrative support; and writing assistance, technical
editing, language editing, and pr oofreading. Those whose
contributions do not justify authorship may be acknowl-
edged individually or together as a group under a single
heading (e.g., “Clinical Investigators” or “Particip ating
Investigators”), and their contributions should be specified
(e.g., “served as scientificadvisors,”“critically reviewed the
study proposal,”“collected data,”“provided and cared for
study patients,”“participated in writing or technical editing
of the manuscript”).
Because acknowledgment may imply endorsement
by acknowledged individuals of a study's data and conclu-
sions, editors are advised to require that the correspond-
ing author obtain written permission to be acknowledged
from all acknowledged individuals.
Use of AI for writing assistance should be reported in
the acknowledgment section.
4. Artificial Intelligence (AI)–Assisted Technology
At submission, the journal should require authors to
disclose whether they used Artificial Intelligence (AI)–
assisted technologies (such as Large Language Models
[LLMs], chatbots, or image creators) in the production of
submitted work. Authors who use such technology
should describe, in both the cover letter and the submit-
ted work in the appropriate section if applicable, how
they used it. For example, if AI was used for writing assis-
tance, describe this in the acknowledgment section (see
Section II.A.3). If AI was used for data collection, analysis,
or figure generation, authors should describe this use in
the methods (see Section IV.A.3.d). Chatbots (such as
ChatGPT) should not be listed as authors because they
cannot be responsible for the accuracy, integrity, and
originality of the work, and these responsibilities are
required for authorship (see Section II.A.1). Therefore,
humans are responsible for any submitted material that
included the use of AI-assisted technologies. Authors
should carefully review and edit the result because AI
can generate authoritative-sounding output that can
be incorrect, incomplete, or biased. Authors should
not list AI and AI-assisted technologies as an author or
co-author, nor cite AI as an author. Authors should be
able to assert that there is no plagiarism in their paper,
including in text and images produced by the AI. Humans
must ensure there is appropriate attribution of all quoted
material, including full citations.
B. Disclosure of Financial and Non-Financial
Relationships and Activities, and Conflicts of
Interest
Public trust in the scientific process and the credibil-
ity of published articles depend in part on how transpar-
ently an author's relationships and activities, directly or
topically related to a work, are handled during the
Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals
www.icmje.org 3