Publication Ethics

Authorship should be limited to individuals who have made a substantial contribution to the conception, design, execution, or interpretation of the reported work, and who have reviewed and approved the final manuscript. Anyone who made a substantial contribution but does not meet full authorship criteria should be named in the acknowledgments instead.

Changes to the author list after submission — adding, removing, or reordering authors — must be requested in writing to the editorial office, with the reason for the change and written agreement from every author, including any author being added or removed.

Submitted manuscripts must be the authors’ own original work, not previously published, and not under consideration elsewhere at the same time. Prior presentation at a conference or deposit as a preprint should be disclosed at submission. See Plagiarism Policy for how originality is checked and how suspected plagiarism is handled.

Authors must disclose any financial or personal relationship that could be seen to influence the reported work — funding sources, consultancies, patents, or competing interests. Editors and reviewers must decline to handle or review a manuscript where they have a conflict, including recent collaboration or a personal relationship with an author.

Data, figures, and images must accurately represent the underlying experiment or measurement. Image adjustments (brightness, contrast, or scaling) are acceptable only when applied equally across an entire image and disclosed where they affect interpretation; splicing, selective enhancement, or any adjustment that misrepresents the original data is not.

Research involving human participants, human data, or animals must have been approved by an appropriate institutional or national ethics committee, and the manuscript must state the approving body and approval reference. See Research Ethics for full requirements, including informed consent.

Editors evaluate manuscripts on their scientific merit, without regard to the authors’ nationality, institution, gender, or other personal characteristics, and independently of any commercial consideration — including the journal’s own publication fee, which plays no role in an editorial decision (see Open Access, Copyright & Licensing).

Concerns about a submitted or published manuscript — plagiarism, data fabrication, undisclosed conflicts, or authorship disputes — should be reported to the editorial office (see Contact). The editors investigate before deciding on an outcome, which may include requesting corrections from the authors, publishing an expression of concern, or retracting the article; see Corrections & Retractions.