Authorship and Contributorship

Impact Surgery follows the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) recommendations for defining authorship and contributorship. Authorship is reserved for individuals who have made a substantial intellectual contribution to the work and who take public responsibility for its content.

To qualify for authorship, all listed authors must meet all four ICMJE criteria:

1. They have made substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work, or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data;
2. They have drafted the work or revised it critically for important intellectual content;
3. They have given final approval of the version to be published;
4. They agree to be accountable for all aspects of the work, ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.

Impact Surgery supports collaborative authorship models where appropriate. This includes corporate or group authorship, large collaborative writing groups, and named investigator or collaborator groups. In such cases, a group name may be listed as the author, with individual contributors named in the article, appendix, or supplementary material, together with a clear description of their roles and responsibilities.

Individuals who contribute to a manuscript but do not meet all four ICMJE criteria should not be listed as authors. Such contributions should instead be acknowledged in a contributorship or acknowledgements section. The journal encourages transparent contributorship statements, including use of the CRediT taxonomy, to describe individual roles.

All authors and collaborators must agree on authorship, contributorship, and author order prior to submission. Any proposed changes to authorship after submission must be approved by all named authors and are subject to editorial review.