Authors' responsibilities
Maintaining integrity of the research and its presentation can be achieved by following the rules of good scientific practice, which include:
- The manuscript has not been submitted to more than one journal for simultaneous consideration.
- The manuscript has not been published previously (partly or in full), unless the new work concerns an expansion of previous work (please provide transparency on the re-use of material to avoid the hint of text-recycling (“self-plagiarism”)).
- A single study is not split up into several parts to increase the quantity of submissions and submitted to various journals or to one journal over time (e.g. “salami-slicing”).
- No data have been fabricated or manipulated (including images) to support your conclusions.
- No data, text, or theories by others are presented as if they were the author’s own (“plagiarism”). Proper acknowledgements to other works must be given (this includes material that is closely copied (near verbatim), summarized and/or paraphrased), quotation marks are used for verbatim copying of material, and permissions are secured for material that is copyrighted.
- Important note: the journal may use software to screen for plagiarism.
- Consent to submit has been received explicitly from all co-authors, as well as from the responsible authorities – tacitly or explicitly – at the institute/organization where the work has been carried out, before the work is submitted.
- Authors whose names appear on the submission have contributed sufficiently to the scientific work and therefore share collective responsibility and accountability for the results.
Guidelines for the use of large language models by authors, reviewers, and editors
- AI or AI-assisted tools do not qualify as authors, only humans do.
- Authors are fully responsible for the entire content of their work.
- Authors are fully responsible for correctly labelling and disclosing which parts of their work has been created by or in assistance of AI:
- AI-tools used to generate results must be described in detail in the methods section.
- AI-tools used for writing and content editing must be disclosed in the acknowledgements.
- Reviewers and editors are obliged to confidentiality and should not upload manuscripts to software or AI-assisted tools where confidentiality cannot be assured.
A detailed statement can be found here.
Cases of suspicion and misconduct
If there is a suspicion of misconduct, the journal will carry out an investigation following the COPE guidelines. If, after investigation, the allegation seems to raise valid concerns, the accused author will be contacted and given an opportunity to address the issue. If misconduct has been established beyond reasonable doubt, this may result in the Editor in Chief’s implementation of the following measures, including, but not limited to:
- If the article is still under consideration, it may be rejected and returned to the author.
- If the article has already been published online, depending on the nature and severity of the infraction, either an erratum will be placed with the article or in severe cases complete retraction of the article will occur. The reason must be given in the published erratum or retraction note.
- The author’s institution may be informed.
Author and name changes
In all cases, further documentation may be required to support your request. The decision on accepting the change rests with the Editor in Chief of the journal and may be turned down. Therefore authors are strongly advised to ensure the correct author group, corresponding author, and order of authors at submission. Upon request authors should be prepared to send relevant documentation or data in order to verify the validity of the results. This could be in the form of raw data, samples, records, etc.
Changes of authorship or in the order of authors in a revision require an explanation included in the revision. The corresponding author is required to provide a written explanation if their revision includes author changes. The clarification should be added on the response to reviewer’s box.
Changes of authorship or in the order of authors after acceptance require an official statement. Justification for changes in authorship must be compelling and may be considered only after receipt of written approval from all authors and a convincing, detailed explanation about the role/deletion of the new/deleted author. Please use the following form:
Declarations section
All manuscripts submitted to Insights into Imaging must contain a “Declarations section” at the end of the main text. The information listed below must be included:
- Ethics approval and consent to participate
- Consent for publication
- Availability of data and material
- Competing interests
- Funding
- Authors’ contributions
- Acknowledgements
- Authors’ information (optional)
Find more information about preparing your manuscript here.
A template of the “Declarations section” can be downloaded by clicking on the link below.