Contribution and Consent of each Author and any Other Information
Authorship Policy
- Authorship Credit
Authorship credits may only be given to those who have made a substantial contribution in constructing the article.
The corresponding author of the article holds the responsibility to give credits to the co-authors that are significantly involved in the work. Also, the corresponding author should make sure that all the co-authors have approved the final submission and ready-to-publish version of the article. Others who have participated in certain substantive aspects of the research should be acknowledged for their contribution in an "Acknowledgement" section.
- Changes in Authorship
The authors are fully responsible to provide the names of the authors upon submitting the article to the journal. Once the article is accepted for publication, any addition, deletion, or rearrangement of the authors’ names will not be entertained unless approved by the journal’s editor. To request such a change, the corresponding author must provide the journal’s editor with:
- the reason for the change in the author list and
- written confirmation (e-mail, letter) from all authors that they agree with the addition, removal or rearrangement, along with the confirmation from the author being added or removed.
Only in exceptional circumstances and with considerable reason/s will the editor may consider the addition, deletion, or rearrangement of authors after the manuscript has been accepted. While the editor considers the request, the processing of the manuscript for publication will be put on hold. If the manuscript has already been published in an online issue, any requests may not be entertained by the editor.
- Order of Authors
It the responsibility of the authors to have a mutual agreement on the order of the authors before submitting the article to the journal. Any such disagreements must be ruled out before the submission.
- Guest Authorship
The “guest” author makes no significant contributions to the study, hence, do not qualify for authorship. Al-Wifaq Research Journals do not allow the appearance of guest authorship on the articles.
- Anonymous Authorship
Because authorship should be transparent and requires public accountability, it is not appropriate to use pseudonyms or to publish scientific reports anonymously. In extremely rare cases, when the author can make a credible claim that attaching his or her name to the document could cause serious hardship (e.g., a threat to personal safety or loss of employment), a journal editor may decide to publish anonymous content.
- Acknowledgment
In the Acknowledgments section, authors may wish to include the names and contributions of those whose involvement in a study did not qualify them for authorship (because of the journal policy) but have contributed to the article in some way.
- Contributors
"Ghost" and/or "Guest" author phenomenon has been common in the traditional listing of research papers. This has been raising inappropriate authorship practice in which some individuals did not have an actual input in the experiment. For this, the journal highly recommends that only authors who have made a significant scientific contribution to the research in the manuscript shall be listed individually in the submitted manuscript (including students and lab technicians).
- Duplicate Submission
Articles that are found to have been published elsewhere, or are under consideration for publishing elsewhere, will be considered as "duplicated" material. In case the author(s) have used their own previously published work (or work that is currently under review), they are asked to cite the previous work and indicate how their submitted manuscript offers novel contributions and adds value differently (from the previous work).
- Citation Manipulation
Submitted manuscripts that are found to include citations in order to increase the number of citations to a given author’s work, or to articles published in a particular journal, will be considered as a "citation manipulation"-containing material.
