To be correctly credited as an author is extremely important for scholarly authors (including your co-authors), so please carefully enter author data (names, degrees, email addresses, ORCIDs and affiliations of all authors) during the submission, and keep checking them for accuracy as the accepted article moves through the production process.
It is important to understand we do not take the authorship information from the manuscript (in fact, you can omit authors from the manuscript). Rather, we use the information from the metadata form for the final publication, which will also be submitted to bibliographic databases such as Medline, and will be used to build our table of contents.
It is therefore important that you check whether the names of all authors (including your co-authors) are correctly spelled in our database (including middle names/initials etc), and that their affiliations are correct as well (copy and paste from the final manuscript, if necessary). We also need the email addresses of your co-authors on file (they will not be published, but we need to have them on file).
The submitting author (not the co-authors) can download a PDF PREVIEW showing how the current list of authors and authorship information will appear in the final manuscript from the following URL (login first):{$journalUrl}/front/pdf/{$articleId}/1
(this PDF is generated dynamically - press reload after making changes to the metadata)
The PDF PREVIEW will also be attached to the initial proofreading request sent all authors in order to allow co-authors to verify how their names and affiliations will be displayed.
The submitting author can make corrections to author names, author initials, author order, author degrees, and author affiliations, if required, in the metadata form. To get to this form, go to the Author menu, and click on the title link of your manuscript. Once you are on the Summary page, scroll down to the Submission Metadata section, and click on Edit Metadata.
The pattern of the direct URL is:{$journalUrl}/author/viewMetadata/{$articleId}
- JMIR only allows one corresponding author, however
- An "equal contribution" footnote for two or more authors can be rendered
All authors should check if their degrees are completely listed, their middle names / initials appear, and all their affiliations are correct, complete, and publishable.
- Never enter author names in ALL CAPS
- Note that authors' degrees should be ordered from lowest to highest (eg, ”MPH, PhD,” not “PhD, MPH”). Use the up/down arrow buttons in the metadata form to order them. Please see our degree guidelines for more information.
- Ask your co-authors if they have middle names. Many authors use their middle names to make themselves more distinguishable in Medline, e.g. "Smith AJ" instead of "Smith A".
- In affiliation lines, do not use short forms or acronyms, for example an affiliation like "Nursing" should be changed into "Department of Nursing", and acronyms like "UHN" should be resolved, e.g. "University Health Network".
- Affiliations are usually in title case (which means that all words except minor words like "of" or "on" are capitalized). Do not enter information in ALL CAPS or all lower case (department of nursing). Do not abbreviate "Dep." or "Dept.".
- If authors have multiple affiliations, all affiliations must be entered (as separate entries)
- City names, if from US or Canada, MUST be followed by the State/Province abbreviation, e.g. "Bethesda, MD" or "Toronto, ON". Enter the state in the "city" field, separate from city with a comma and blank.
- Add the ORCID of all authors (What is an ORCID?, and As submitting author, where do I enter the ORCIDs of my coauthors?)
Before acceptance, title, abstract, keywords, acknowledgements, conflicts of interest etc. are in the manuscript (but also in the metadata form), and the information in the manuscript file is deemed the authoritative one.
After acceptance (at the latest, during copyediting step 2, see What are the steps during copyediting?), make sure both information in the metadata form and the manuscript are in sync. In other words, transfer the title, keywords and abstract from the final paper into the metadata form. For guidelines on the title format see What are JMIR's guidelines for article titles?
After acceptance, in order to avoid confusion with author names and affiliations from your final manuscript file, please remove author names and affiliations from your final manuscript file and double check that the information in the metadata form is complete and correct. Also, add a comment for the copyeditor in the manuscript (using the Word comment function) saying "I and my coauthors have approved the authorship information as rendered on {$journalUrl}/front/pdf/{$articleId}/1".
Then upload your final manuscript (with author names and affiliations removed) to:
{$journalUrl}/author/submissionReview/{$articleId}
See also:
- How should I enter author affiliations?
- Choosing Keywords
- What are JMIR's guidelines for article titles?
- As submitting author, where do I enter the ORCIDs of my co-authors?
- As a co-author, how do I add my ORCID to the manuscript metadata?
- As a Chinese/Asian author, I want my family name to occur before the given name on the author list underneath the article title. Should I just enter my family name into the "first name" field, and my given name in the "last name" field?