Note

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Authorship

A manuscript should list as authors only those people who made a significant contribution to the work presented in the manuscript. Significant contributions include, but are not limited to, the original conception of the study, the design of experimental and numerical protocoles, the analysis and interpretation of results, and the drafting and editing of the manuscript. Those who made indirect contributions to the study, or whose contributions were not significant, should not be listed as authors and should instead be noted in the acknowledgements section of the manuscript. All authors must have an ORCID iD (or another persistent identifier that is supported by the journal).

All authors should be able to identify their contribution to the manuscript and should be familiar with the contributions of the other authors. Each author is responsible for the integrity of their own work and should have confidence in the integrity of the manuscript as a whole. All authors must agree to submit the manuscript for peer review with the journal before doing so, and they must all agree to the submission of any subsequent revisions.

The ordering of the author list should be decided upon before submitting the manuscript to the journal. The first author should be that person who made the most significant intellectual contribution to the work. When the contributions of two or more leading authors are equal, it is possible to choose shared first authorship. If an authorship dispute arises at any point, the peer review process will be stopped and will resume only when the dispute is resolved. If the dispute can not be resolved, the editor will withdraw the manuscript from consideration. Changes to the author list during peer review must be agreed upon by all authors. Editors are not in a position to determine authorship nor to resolve authorship disputes.

Each manuscript must designate a corresponding author who has additional responsibilities. This author is responsible for all correspondence with the journal and for any future correspondence resulting from reader inquiries. The corresponding author assures that the manuscript satisfies all of the journal’s policies and attests to the contribution of each author by use of the Contributor Role Taxonomy (CRediT). The corresponding author is responsible for issuing a correction or retraction if significant errors are discovered after the manuscript is published.

Contributor Role Taxonomy (CRediT)

Each submitted manuscript must include an “Author contribution statement” that details each of the author’s contributions to the work. The Contributor Role Taxonomy (CRediT) is used for identifying and specifying author contributions, and these roles are summarized in the following table.

Role	Description
Conceptualization	Ideas; formulation or evolution of overarching research goals and aims.
Data curation	Management activities to annotate (produce metadata), scrub data and maintain research data (including software code, where it is necessary for interpreting the data itself) for initial use and later re-use.
Formal analysis	Application of statistical, mathematical, computational, or other formal techniques to analyze or synthesize study data.
Funding acquisition	Acquisition of the financial support for the project leading to this publication.
Investigation	Conducting a research and investigation process, specifically performing the experiments, or data/evidence collection.
Methodology	Development or design of methodology; creation of models.
Project administration	Management and coordination responsibility for the research activity planning and execution.
Resources	Provision of study materials, reagents, materials, patients, laboratory samples, animals, instrumentation, computing resources, or other analysis tools.
Software	Programming, software development; designing computer programs; implementation of the computer code and supporting algorithms; testing of existing code components.
Supervision	Oversight and leadership responsibility for the research activity planning and execution, including mentorship external to the core team.
Validation	Verification, whether as a part of the activity or separate, of the overall replication/reproducibility of results/experiments and other research outputs.
Visualization	Preparation, creation and/or presentation of the published work, specifically visualization/data presentation.
Writing – original draft	Preparation, creation and/or presentation of the published work, specifically writing the initial draft (including substantive translation).
Writing – review & editing	Preparation, creation and/or presentation of the published work by those from the original research group, specifically critical review, commentary or revision – including pre- or post-publication stages.