Believers Journal of Health Sciences (BJHS) recognises authorship as both an academic credit and a direct accountability. Authorship must be limited exclusively to individuals who have made substantial intellectual contributions to a manuscript and who take full responsibility for the integrity of the published work. All listed authors must meet the criteria; non-qualifying individuals should be logged as contributors.
To legally qualify as an author, an individual must satisfies all four of the following consecutive parameters:
* Critical Note: Meeting only one or two of these specific criteria steps is not sufficient to claim authorship credits.
The corresponding author acts as the primary communications proxy throughout submission, review, publication, and post-launch loops. Duties include verifying that all eligible contributors are tracked, securing final text approvals from the full co-author group, distributing reviewer memos, submitting required declarations (CRediT data, conflicts, funding, IRB approvals), and remaining available post-publication. This administrative role does not lessen the individual responsibilities of other co-authors.
BJHS enforces zero tolerance against unethical authorship setups, defining barriers against:
Identified irregularities trigger administrative rejection or retraction audits in line with research misconduct policies.
Group Layouts: Consortia or collaborative networks can be listed under a group name only when individual members meeting full author criteria are clearly mapped out in the metadata. Changes: Any adjustment to the author list (additions, deletions, or reordering) after system ingest requires a written explanation, signed consent forms from every single author, and final clearance from the Editor-in-Chief. Changes are blocked after acceptance.
Disputes: Author sequence disputes must be settled within the research group before submission. The journal will pause workflow processing during active disputes but will not adjudicate internal team arguments.
All submissions must embed an explicit Author Contribution Statement utilizing the standard CRediT taxonomy matrix, detailing exact role codes: Conceptualisation, Methodology, Investigation, Data Curation, Formal Analysis, Software, Validation, Visualisation, Writing – Original Draft, Writing – Review & Editing, Supervision, Project Administration, Funding Acquisition, and Resources.
Individuals who supplied purely administrative assistance, language editing, raw data collection help without design input, or general laboratory funding do not qualify for authorship. With their permission, they should be logged inside a separate Acknowledgements segment.
Generative artificial intelligence tools, large language models (LLMs), or chatbots cannot be listed as an author, co-author, or corresponding author. AI systems cannot take intellectual or ethical accountability for research data accuracy. Material deployment of automated tools must be disclosed following the journal's AI policy guidelines.
By clicking submission completion, the corresponding author guarantees that all listed authors meet the explicit authorship criteria, the sequence has been agreed upon by all parties, no eligible contributor has been omitted, and non-qualifying individuals are mapped to the acknowledgements. Supplying deceptive authorship data represents a severe breach of publication integrity rules.