Authorship and contributorship

Authorship gives credit for a piece of work and also carries responsibility for it. Journal Law and Justice follows the recommendations of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) and COPE's guidance on authorship and contributorship.

Who qualifies as an author

Everyone listed as an author must meet all four criteria:

1. A substantial contribution to the conception or design of the work, or to the acquisition, analysis or interpretation of the data.
2. Drafting the work or revising it critically for important intellectual content.
3. Approval of the final version to be published.
4. Agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work, so that questions about its accuracy or integrity are investigated and resolved.

People who contributed in other ways, such as technical help, writing or language assistance, data collection without analysis, general supervision of a research group or obtaining funding, are named in the Acknowledgements with their permission, not as authors.

Corresponding author

• Acts as the main contact with the journal during review and after publication.
• Makes sure every co-author has seen and approved the manuscript, the author list and the order of authors before submission.
• Makes sure all authors' names, affiliations, ORCID iDs and emails are correct in the submission.
• Shares the editor's communications with co-authors.

Contributions (CRediT)

Authors are encouraged to describe each person's role with the CRediT taxonomy (for example: conceptualisation, methodology, formal analysis, investigation, writing – original draft, writing – review and editing, supervision, funding acquisition). The statement is published with the article.

Changes to the author list

• Authorship should be settled before submission.
• Adding, removing or reordering authors after submission requires a request from the corresponding author with the reason and the written agreement of every author, including the person being added or removed.
• The editor decides on the request and may pause the review while it is resolved. After acceptance, changes are made only in exceptional cases.
• Disputes are resolved by the authors and their institutions; the editor follows the relevant COPE flowchart and does not adjudicate the dispute.

Not acceptable

• Ghost authorship: leaving out someone who meets the criteria.
• Guest or gift authorship: listing someone who does not meet the criteria.
• Listing generative AI tools as authors: they cannot take responsibility for the work.

Affiliations are those of the institutions where the work was done. A change of affiliation after the work is shown as a present address.