Authorship Responsibilities

About Authorship As academic institutions have set publication in peer reviewed journals as one of the key performance indicators (KPIs), academics often seek collaboration with their peers and students to get more articles published. It is, however, noticed that the quality of the articles submitted to the Journal does not always reflect the reputation of the academics who have been cited as authors in a paper, raising questions as to whether these individuals have contributed sufficiently to warrant authorship in the articles attributed to them. IJIFSD, like other publishers such as Emerald, subscribes to the authorship principles charted by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE), which stipulate four criteria for an author to be conferred authorship rights. Specifically, authors must have: • Made substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data for the work; and • Drafted the work or revised it critically for important intellectual content; and • Given their final approval of the version to be published; and • Agreed 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. Regarding authorship attribution, it is the collective responsibility of authors to recognise all individuals who have fulfilled all the above-mentioned criteria of authorship as well as agree on the order of the authors’ names based on the authors’ individual contributions. As part of publication ethics, IJIFSD publishes a declaration of authors indicating the specific works carried out by each of the authors. Among the list of authors, a corresponding author should also be identified for the publication. The corresponding author is responsible for getting all approvals from fellow authors and is the principal point of contact for communication with the journal. It is likewise crucial to differentiate between those who should be attributed as authors and those who should be mentioned under ‘acknowledgements’ for having supported the research by acquiring funding, providing research grants, collecting data, providing general research supervision, critically reviewing the article, or having been involved in technical editing, proofreading, or translation. An acknowledgement section, placed at the end of the article published in IJIFSD, provides for: A note of thanks for any kind of assistance the authors have received in the conduct of the research; Declaration of funding sources; Declaration if the article draws from any previous work (e.g., conference proceedings, or PhD work, or a draft published on online repositories).