IMJ follow the authorship criteria stated in ICMJE recommendations (http://www.icmje.org/icmje-recommendations.pdf). The journal does not entertain manuscripts from non-medical graduates.

1. Correspondence Author: According to IMJ authorship policy, the corresponding author must be a medical graduate/PhD with relevant specialist qualifications.  Only one author should be accepted as a corresponding author, who is eligible enough to take primary responsibility for communication with the journal during the manuscript submission, peer review, and publication process. He should be able to ensure that all the journal’s administrative requirements, such as providing details of authorship, ethics committee approval, clinical trial registration, documentation, gathering conflict of interest forms and statements, are properly completed at the time of manuscript processing. The corresponding author should be available for communication (email and telephone) throughout the review process and should promptly respond to editorial queries. Moreover, after publication of manuscript, he should also available to respond to critiques of the work and cooperate with any requests from the journal for data or additional information should, questions about the paper arise after publication.

The corresponding author must provide a final list of all authors, with their qualifications, designation, contact details (Telephone/cell number, E-mail addresses), contribution of each author (according to ICMJE criteria as stated in ICMJE recommendations (http://www.icmje.org/icmje-recommendations.pdf), on the title page of manuscript at the time of submission, ensuring the correct sequence of the authors, which will not be considered for any addition, deletion or rearrangement after submission of the manuscript.

2. Authorship Criteria: The IMJ follows the criteria for authorship as recommended by ICMJE (http://www.icmje.org/recommendations/browse/roles-and-responsibilities/defining-the-role-of-authors-and-contributors.html). As per IMJ policy the authorship should be based on the following four criteria:

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

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

2.3. Final approval of the version to be published; AND

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

All the four criteria for authorship are to be fulfilled. Practices of ghost and gift authorship are strongly discouraged by IMJ. In authorship, mere supervision of project, data collection, statistical analysis, proofreading, and formatting do not grant authorship rights. Ideally all authors should belong to same discipline or department of an institute, except for multi-center and multi-specialty studies. In case of authorship from different disciplines or departments justification should be provided for authorship eligibility.

3. Only six authors are allowed in a single institution/single discipline study. In a multi institution/multi-disciplinary and international collaboration research, Editorial Board shall guide on individual case basis.

4. Self institutional publications are not accepted. (HEC criteria)

Updated October 13, 2021