a. Authorship Credit

• Authorship of the work may only be credited to those who have made a noteworthy contribution in conceptualization, design, conducting, data analysis and writing up of the manuscript.
• It is the responsibility of the corresponding author to include the name(s) of only those coauthors who have made significant contributions to the work.
• The corresponding author should ensure that all co-authors have seen and approved the final version of the paper and have agreed to its submission for publication. Others who have participated in the certain substantive aspect of the research should be acknowledged for their contribution in an "Acknowledgement" section.

b. Changes in Authorship

Authors are expected to consider carefully the list and order of authors before submitting their manuscript and provide the definitive list of authors at the time of the submission. Any addition, deletion or rearrangement of author names in the authorship list should be made only before the manuscript has been accepted and only if approved by the journal Editor. To request such a change, the Editor must receive the following from the corresponding author: (a) the reason for the change in author list and (b) written confirmation (e-mail, letter) from all authors that they agree with the addition, removal or rearrangement. In the case of addition or removal of authors, this includes confirmation from the author being added or removed. Only in exceptional circumstances will the Editor may consider the addition, deletion or rearrangement of authors after the manuscript has been accepted. While the Editor considers the request, publication of the manuscript will be suspended. If the manuscript has already been published in an online issue, any requests may not be approved by the Editor.

c. Order of Authors

The order of authors in the byline is a collective decision of the authors or study group. Disagreements about author order should be resolved by the authors before the article is submitted for publication.

d. Guest Authorship

Guest authorship has been defined as authorship based solely on an expectation that the inclusion of a particular name will improve the chances that the study will be published or increase the perceived status of the publication. The “guest” author makes no discernible contributions to the study, so this person meets none of the criteria for authorship.

e. Anonymous Authorship

Because authorship should be transparent and requires public accountability, it is not appropriate to use pseudonyms or to publish scientific reports anonymously. In extremely rare cases, when the author can make a credible claim that attaching his or her name to the document could cause serious hardship (e.g., threat to personal safety or loss of employment), a journal editor may decide to publish anonymous content.

f. Acknowledgment

In an Acknowledgments section, authors may wish to include the names and contributions of those whose involvement in a study did not qualify them for authorship or, because of journal policy on the number of authors in the author byline, cannot be included in the author byline.

g. Contributors

"Ghost" and/or "Guest" author phenomenon has been common in the traditional listing of research papers. This has been raising inappropriate authorship practice in which some individuals did not have an actual input in the experiment. For this, the JQM highly recommends that only authors who have made a significant scientific contribution to the research in the manuscript shall be listed individually in the submitted manuscript (including students and lab technicians).

h. Duplicate Submission

Manuscripts that are found to have been published elsewhere, or to be under review elsewhere, will be considered as a "duplicated" material.  In case the author(s) have used their own previously published work (or work that is currently under review), they are asked to cite the previous work and indicate how their submitted manuscript offers novel contributions and added values beyond that in their previous work.

i. Citation Manipulation

Submitted manuscripts that are found to include citations in order to increase the number of citations to a given author’s work, or to articles published in a particular journal, will be considered as a "citation manipulation"-containing material.