Substantial Contribution
Authorship should reflect meaningful intellectual, analytical, methodological, or writing contributions.
Authorship, Attribution & Publication Ethics Policy
Credit the work honestly. Correct the record visibly.
The JR Institute intends to ensure that authorship, contribution, citation, disclosure, correction, and publication practices reflect the actual scholarly record rather than status, pressure, convenience, or institutional power.
Developing Framework
This page presents a planned public standard. Final authorship forms, dispute procedures, publication review, correction standards, and research-integrity authorities should be established before active publishing programs expand.
Policy Purpose
Authorship is both credit and responsibility.
A byline affects reputation, career advancement, intellectual priority, accountability, and public confidence in research.
The Institute should recognize real contributions, reject honorary and ghost authorship, disclose relevant interests, and preserve visible corrections when the record changes.
Core Principles
Accurate credit, accountable authorship, transparent disclosure, and permanent correction.
Accountability
Authors should approve the work, understand their contributions, and accept responsibility for the integrity of the record.
Contributor Transparency
Describe who designed, collected, analyzed, coded, supervised, funded, and wrote.
No Hidden Influence
Disclose sponsors, editors, writers, organizations, tools, and interests that shaped the work.
Citation Integrity
Cite relevant sources accurately without fabrication, coercion, padding, or deliberate omission.
Visible Correction
Correct, withdraw, or retract flawed work without erasing the history of the record.
Scope
This policy is intended to apply to manuscripts, preprints, technical reports, conference papers, datasets, software papers, policy briefs, institutional publications, presentations, and other scholarly or technical outputs.
Authorship Criteria
An author should ordinarily make a substantial contribution to the work, participate in drafting or critical revision, approve the final version, and accept responsibility for the integrity of their contribution and the publication as a whole.
Funding, seniority, title, supervision, access to facilities, or administrative authority alone should not qualify a person for authorship.
Contributor Roles and Acknowledgments
Contributions that do not meet authorship criteria should be recognized accurately through acknowledgments or structured contributor statements.
- Conceptualization and methodology
- Data collection, curation, and validation
- Software, modeling, and analysis
- Visualization and figure preparation
- Writing, editing, and project administration
- Funding acquisition, resources, and supervision
Author Order and Equal Contribution
Author order should be discussed early, revisited when contributions change, and documented before submission.
Equal-contribution and senior-author designations should be used only when they reflect the actual contribution structure.
No person should use employment, funding, immigration, grading, or supervisory authority to demand authorship they did not earn.
Corresponding-Author Responsibilities
The corresponding author should coordinate author approval, submission, disclosures, repository deposits, responses to editorial questions, corrections, and communication after publication.
This role does not give one author unilateral authority to remove contributors, suppress concerns, or change the final record without agreement.
Authorship Disputes
Disputes should be addressed as early as possible through documented discussion, contribution review, mediation, or independent institutional assessment.
Review should consider actual contributions, prior agreements, drafts, laboratory records, code history, correspondence, and field norms.
Plagiarism, Duplicate Publication, and Citation Integrity
Authors should not present another person’s words, ideas, data, images, code, or structure as their own.
Substantial duplicate publication, fragmented publication designed to mislead, fabricated citations, citation manipulation, and undisclosed reuse should be avoided.
Images, Figures, Tables, and Digital Manipulation
Images and figures should accurately represent the underlying data and should not be altered in ways that obscure, add, remove, duplicate, or exaggerate material information.
Adjustments should be applied consistently, documented when material, and supported by retained original files.
Funding, Conflicts, Assistance, and AI Disclosure
Publications should disclose relevant funding, sponsor involvement, financial interests, institutional relationships, editorial assistance, professional writing, and other influences on the work.
Material use of generative or analytical AI should be disclosed when it affects drafting, analysis, code, images, interpretation, or the reproducibility of the work. AI systems should not be listed as authors.
Corrections, Expressions of Concern, Withdrawals, and Retractions
Errors should be corrected promptly in proportion to their effect on the record.
Serious uncertainty may require an expression of concern, while unreliable or unethical work may require withdrawal or retraction.
Notices should identify what changed, why action was taken, who authorized it, and whether the conclusions remain reliable.
Framework date: July 2026
Publication Integrity Lifecycle
Agree, document, disclose, publish, correct, and preserve.
- Agree early. Discuss authorship, order, roles, ownership, and publication strategy before conflict develops.
- Document contributions. Preserve records showing who designed, collected, analyzed, coded, supervised, and wrote.
- Disclose influence. Identify funding, conflicts, assistance, sponsor roles, and material AI use.
- Publish accurately. Present data, images, citations, methods, and limitations honestly.
- Correct visibly. Use permanent notices, linked versions, and proportionate action when the record changes.
Authorship or Publication Questions
Ask about credit, contribution, disputes, corrections, or publication integrity.
Inquiries may concern author order, acknowledgments, corresponding-author duties, plagiarism, citation practices, image integrity, disclosures, corrections, withdrawals, or retractions.
Submit a Publication Ethics Inquiry
Identify the work, authors, disputed contribution, publication status, deadline, and available supporting information.
Contact the Institute