Authorship confers credit to substantive intellectual contributions and implies responsibility and accountability for published work.
To specify the contributions authors can make to a manuscript, Geodynamica uses the authorship roles defined in the CREDiT system. In order to qualify for authorship of a manuscript, an individual needs to have contributed to the manuscript in at least two different roles:
- Conceptualization of the study: Formulation or evolution of overarching research goals and aims.
- Methodology: Development or design of methodology; creation of models.
- Software: Programming and software development; designing computer programs; implementation of the computer code and supporting algorithms; testing of existing code components.
- Validation, Verification, Replication & Reproducibility: As a part of the activity or separate, of the methodology, results, or experiments and other research outputs.
- Formal analysis: Application of statistical, mathematical, computational, or other formal techniques to analyse or synthesise study data.
- Investigation: Conducting a research and investigation process, specifically performing the experiments, or data/evidence collection.
- Resources: Provision of study materials, reagents, materials, patients, laboratory samples, animals, instrumentation, computing resources, or other analysis tools.
- 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 reuse.
- 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.
- Visualisation: Preparation, creation and/or presentation of the published work, specifically visualisation and data presentation.
- Supervision: Oversight and leadership responsibility for the research activity planning and execution, including mentorship external to the core team.
- Project administration: Management and coordination responsibility for the research activity planning and execution.
- Funding acquisition: Acquisition of the financial support for the project leading to this publication.
A statement on author contributions following this system is mandatory for any publications in Geodynamica. Contributors who meet less than two of the above criteria for authorship should not be listed as authors. Instead, their contributions should be acknowledged in the Acknowledgements.
First authors (also main authors or leading authors) are individuals who conduct the majority of the work. First authors are responsible and accountable for the parts of the work they have done; are responsible for identifying who meets the criteria for (co-)authorship and should know which authors are responsible for other parts of the work; and should ensure the integrity of the contributions of the author team.
A corresponding author is the individual who takes primary responsibility for communication with the journal during the manuscript submission, peer review, and publication process. At the time of submission, the corresponding author is responsible for ensuring that the author’s contributions are accurate and the manuscript version is agreed upon by all authors. After publication of the manuscript, the corresponding author remains available to respond to enquiries and critiques on the work and fulfil any requests for data or additional information.
All authors should approve the submitted and final versions to be published, and agree 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.