Authorship

All work must have been approved by all co-authors prior to submission.

Authorship credit should be based on the following criteria: 1) substantial contributions to conception and design, acquisition of data, or analysis and interpretation of data; 2) drafting the article or revising it critically for intellectual content; and 3) final approval of the version to be published.

Multicentre groups: When a multicentre group has conducted the study, all individuals who accept direct responsibility for the manuscript should be identified. When submitting a group author manuscript, the corresponding author should clearly identify all individual authors, as well as the group name.

A conflict of interest statement, author contributions and funding should all be included on the title page of the article.

Copyright

On submission of the article the Copyright Form must be signed by the submitting author and uploaded with the manuscript.

On acceptance, the Copyright form must be signed by all authors, either on the same form or on different forms, and sent by email or fax to the Editorial Office. The article will not be sent to press until signatures have been obtained from all authors.

Copyright form (PDF 41K0)