Authorship
Everyone listed as an author should have made a substantial contribution to the work, helped draft or revise it, approved the final version and agreed to be accountable for it. Others who helped should be thanked in the acknowledgements. Changes to the author list after submission need the written agreement of every author.
One author acts as the corresponding author. They handle all correspondence with the journal and keep their co-authors informed.
Title, abstract and keywords
- The title should be concise and informative.
- The abstract should summarise the question, approach, main findings and their significance, within the word limit shown on the submission form. Avoid references and abbreviations in the abstract.
- Give three to eight keywords that a reader might search for.
Anonymising your manuscript
The journal uses double-blind peer review, so the manuscript you upload must not reveal who wrote it. Remove names, affiliations, acknowledgements and funding details from the file, refer to your own earlier work in the third person, and clear the author name from the document properties. These details are collected separately on the submission form.
Declarations
On submission, authors confirm that the work is original and not under consideration elsewhere, and provide:
- a competing interests statement (or a statement that there are none)
- a funding statement, where the work was funded
- confirmation that research involving people followed appropriate ethical standards, including informed consent
- a statement about any use of AI tools (see the AI-use policy)
ORCID
We encourage every author to give an ORCID iD, which helps to identify authors reliably and is shown on the published article.