Authorship

Each author should be substantially involved in the work in order to take the responsibility for the content of publication.
Criteria of authorship are a great contribution to
1. elaboration of conception and design or to data collection as well as to analysis and interpretation of the obtained data;
2. drafting the article or its proper review concerning fundamental aspects of its content;
3. final approval/agreement of the version to be published.
All individuals defined as “authors” should meet the criteria mentioned above.
All participants termed as authors get the right of authorship.
The sequence in which the authors are indicated in the article is determined by their collective decision. While submitting the article the authors should indicate contribution of every person to its preparation in the covering letter. The given information can be published.
Authorship cannot be recognized in case of:
1. Financing the research.
2. General supervision of a research group.
3. Data collection alone cannot be the reason for authorship recognition.
Individuals who provided financial or technical help while conducting the research and preparing the manuscript can be listed in the section “Acknowledgments”. Research participants who collected the data only can be listed in the section “Clinical investigators” or “Participating investigators”. In this case they should provide the written permission for promulgation of their names because readers may conclude that the research participants have approved the data and conclusions preesented in the article.

Credibility of the submitted results

Authors are responsible for credibility of the results presented in the article. The submitted manuscript should be endorsed by all authors. It proves that all authors take responsibility for the publication content.
Authors have to inform in the cover letter or in the manuscript in the section “Materials and methods” about the establishment where the research was carried out as well as about scientific programs whereunder the study was performed.
Authors should check all the references.

Patients’ rights and confidentiality

In cases when diagnostic and treatment methods do not correspond to the standard procedures, the approval by the Ethics Committee of the institution where the research was conducted should be presented as well as the correspondence of the methods employed to the Helsinki Declaration of 1975 and its reviewed variant of 2000.
In doubtful cases authors should submit to the editorial staff (when requested) the reasoning of the applied approaches as well as the evidence that the Ethics Committee of the institution approved all doubtful aspects of the research.
Patients have the right to privacy that has not be violated without their informed consent.
Authors have to inform patients (parents, guardians) about the possibility of publishing the materials revealing the details of his/her disease and the used methods of diagnostics and treatment as well as about the guarantees to provide confidentiality when publishing the materials in the print and electronic media and also about their availability in the Internet after publication.
When submitting the article to the editorial staff authors have to provide the patient’s written informed consent for disclosing the information and inform about it in the article.
The information identifying the personality of a patient (patients’ surnames and initials, registration number of the card) is prohibited to be published in articles. Photos presented for publication should not identify patient either.

Ethical aspects of using animals in medical research

When reporting on the experiments on animals authors have to present in the article the information about the accordance of keeping and using laboratory animals while conducting the research to international requirements and requirements of the animals handling of the institution where the research was conducted.