This page states who may be listed as an author of an article in QAIRU Journal, how contributions are declared using CRediT roles, what the corresponding author is responsible for, and how changes and disputes concerning the author list are handled.
Authorship carries credit and accountability in equal measure. This page states who may be listed as an author, how contributions are declared, and what happens when the author list changes or is disputed.
An author is a person who meets all four of the following conditions:
All four conditions must be met. A person who meets some of them is not an author.
Contributions that do not meet all four conditions are recognised in the acknowledgements. This applies to, among others, those who provided funding alone, supplied materials, equipment, data or computing resources, performed routine technical work, gave general supervision of the research group, or edited the language of the manuscript. Named individuals must consent to being acknowledged, because acknowledgement can imply endorsement of the conclusions.
Every submission includes a contributor statement written with the CRediT taxonomy. Each author is listed with the roles they performed; a role may be shared by several authors, and an author may hold several roles. The fourteen roles are:
Conceptualization; Data curation; Formal analysis; Funding acquisition; Investigation; Methodology; Project administration; Resources; Software; Supervision; Validation; Visualization; Writing - original draft; Writing - review and editing.
The statement is published with the article and should read as follows:
Family Name A: Conceptualization, Methodology, Software, Writing - original draft. Family Name B: Formal analysis, Validation, Visualization, Writing - review and editing. Family Name C: Data curation, Investigation, Supervision, Funding acquisition.
One author acts as the corresponding author and is responsible for:
Nothing in this role gives the corresponding author authority over the other authors: obligations under condition 4 above are borne by every author.
Every author must have an ORCID identifier and supply it at submission. The identifier is published with the article. Affiliations should be given with a ROR identifier where the institution has one; this is welcomed but not mandatory.
The order of the authors is decided by the authors themselves before submission. The journal does not prescribe, question or alter it. If the order carries a specific meaning in the authors' field or group, that meaning may be stated in the contributor statement.
Any addition, removal or change of order requires a written request from the corresponding author to the editorial office that contains:
The request is not processed until all of these are received. After acceptance, such changes are exceptional and require the approval of the Editor-in-Chief. Where the article has already been published, an approved change is announced as a correction; see Corrections and Retractions.
| Practice | What it means |
|---|---|
| Ghost authorship | Omitting a person who meets all four conditions, including a professional writer who drafted the text |
| Gift or honorary authorship | Listing a person who does not meet the conditions, for example a head of department, a funder or a senior colleague |
| Sale or transfer of authorship | Offering, buying or exchanging a position on the author list |
| Paper mills | Submitting work produced or brokered by a service that sells manuscripts, data or authorship |
Where any of these is established, the journal acts under Publication Ethics and Malpractice Statement, which may lead to rejection, retraction, notification of the authors' institutions and a ban on future submissions.
A generative AI tool cannot be an author. It cannot approve a manuscript and cannot be held accountable for the work, so it fails conditions 3 and 4. Any use of such a tool is declared as set out in the Generative AI Policy, and the authors remain responsible for everything the article contains.
Where the work is attributed to a group, the article may carry the group name in the author list, either alone or after the named authors. The individual members represented by the group name are listed in the article, with their affiliations and, where they meet the four conditions, their ORCID identifiers and CRediT roles. Members who do not meet the conditions are listed as collaborators in the acknowledgements. The corresponding author confirms that every listed member has agreed to the version submitted.
An author who dies before publication remains on the author list. The corresponding author informs the editorial office, and the article carries a note that the author is deceased. Where possible, the corresponding author obtains the agreement of the deceased author's institution or next of kin to the submitted version, and confirms in writing that the deceased author had approved the substance of the work.
The journal does not arbitrate disputes about authorship. It has no means of establishing who did what within a research group and no authority over the parties.
When a dispute is raised, consideration of the manuscript is suspended. The parties are asked to resolve the matter, and the journal refers it to the institutions of the authors concerned, which are the competent bodies for investigating it. The manuscript is not published, and no change is made to a published article, until the journal receives a written statement of the resolution signed by all parties or a determination from the institution. A dispute raised after publication is handled under Corrections and Retractions.
Effective date: 2026-09-01 · Version: 1.0 · Questions: journal@qairu.edu.kz