Authorship Principle

Authorship and contributorship

Schole calls the attention of authors to read our author policies carefully before submission. It is required that authors should prepare and format their papers and other supplementary files to comply with Guidelines for Authors.

Schole would not consider a paper for publication if it has been published or is currently under consideration for publication in other journals. Multiple submissions and redundant publications of a paper are prohibited. In the cover letter, authors must state that the manuscript is not under consideration for publication elsewhere or has appeared elsewhere in a manner that could be considered as a prior or duplication of the same work.

Authorship

It is recommended that authorship be based on the following four criteria to avoid authorship disputes:

Substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data for the work;

Drafting the work or revising it critically for important intellectual content;

Final approval of the version to be published;

Agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work and to ensure that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.

All those designated as authors should meet all four criteria for authorship, and all who meet the four criteria should be identified as authors.

Corresponding authors

The corresponding authors take primary responsibility for communication with the journal during the manuscript submission, peer review, and publication process, and ensure that all the journal’s requirements, such as providing details of authorship, ethics committee approval, clinical trial registration documentation, and gathering conflict of interest forms and statements, are properly satisfied.

Contributorship

Schole journals list contributors in two ways. Firstly, we publish a list of authors' names at the beginning of the paper and, secondly, we list contributors (some of whom may not be included as authors) at the end of the paper in Acknowledgments section.

We adopt Contributor Roles Taxonomy CReDiT. The model uses 14 pre-defined contributor roles: conceptualization; data curation; formal analysis; funding acquisition; investigation; methodology; project administration; resources; software; supervision; validation; visualization; writing–original draft; writing–review & editing.

The editors of this journal generally will not consider changes to authorship once a manuscript has been submitted. It is important that authors carefully consider the authorship list and order of authors and provide a definitive author list at original submission.

Changes to authorship

All authors must be listed in the manuscript and their details entered into the submission system.

Any addition, deletion or rearrangement of author names in the authorship list should only be made prior to acceptance, and only if approved by the journal editor.

Requests to change authorship should be made by the corresponding author, who must provide the reason for the request to the journal editor with written confirmation from all authors, including any authors being added or removed, that they agree with the addition, removal or rearrangement.

Only in exceptional circumstances will the journal editor consider the addition, deletion or rearrangement of authors post acceptance.

Publication of the manuscript may be paused while a change in authorship request is being considered.

Any authorship change requests approved by the journal editor will result in a corrigendum if the manuscript has already been published.

Any unauthorised authorship changes may result in the rejection of the article, or retraction, if the article has already been published.

Use of AI or AI-Assisted Writing

When it comes to the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and AI-assisted technology in manuscript preparation, Schole follows the position statement of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) . Tools such as ChatGPT and other large language models (LLMs) do not meet authorship criteria and thus cannot be listed as authors on manuscripts. In situations where AI or AI-assisted tools have been used in the preparation of a manuscript, this must be appropriately declared with sufficient details at submission via the cover letter. Furthermore, authors are required to be transparent about the use of these tools and disclose details of how the AI tool was used.

The use of generative AI and AI-assisted technologies in scientific writing must be declared by adding a statement at the end of the manuscript when the paper is first submitted. The statement will appear in the published work and should be placed in a new section before the references list. Here is an example:

Title of new section: Declaration of generative AI and AI-assisted technologies in the writing process.

Statement: During the preparation of this work the author(s) used [NAME TOOL / SERVICE] in order to [REASON]. After using this tool/service, the author(s) reviewed and edited the content as needed and take(s) full responsibility for the content of the published article.

The declaration does not apply to the use of basic tools, such as tools used to check grammar, spelling and references.

Authors are fully responsible for the originality, validity, and integrity of the content of their manuscript, including any material contributed by AI or AI-assisted tools, and must ensure that this content complies with our publication ethics policies.

Please note: to protect authors' rights and the confidentiality of their research, this journal does not currently allow the use of Generative AI or AI-assisted technologies such as ChatGPT or similar services by reviewers or editors in the peer review and manuscript evaluation process. We are actively evaluating compliant AI tools and may revise this policy in the future.