How should the "Acknowledgments" and "Funding" sections be formatted?

The Acknowledgments section specifies any persons and/or organizations the authors wish to mention. This is not a required section; this section is included in the final publication if provided. 

Authors are required to declare funding sources, grants, or financial sponsors supporting the research. This information should be stated in a separate Funding section. See below section on Funding (required). Declaring an absence of funding is also required. 

Acknowledgement (optional)

See below for JMIR’s formatting/wording preferences:

• The section should be titled “Acknowledgments” (without an ‘e’ after ‘g’)
• In the Word doc, this section should appears at the end of the Discussion section (move any acknowledgments occurring within the manuscript here).
• The acknowledgments statement(s) should be written narratively (ie, bullet point lists are not permitted)
• All abbreviations used in the Acknowledgments section should be defined therein and be considered self-contained; however, these abbreviations should not be included in the abbreviations list
• Any persons mentioned here who are not authors of the paper should be addressed by their full names; titles (Dr, Ms) and degrees are optional (note: per the AMA style, do not use both an honorific and an academic degree with a person’s name, for example, Claudia Achenbach, MD, PhD, or Dr Claudia Achenbach, but not Dr Claudia Achenbach, MD, PhD)
• If an author’s first name contains a hyphen, the hyphen must not be retained in the initials (eg, Ka-Wai Tam and Hyun-seok Kim should be initialed as KWT and HSK, respectively); however, if an author’s last name contains a hyphen, the hyphen must be retained (eg, Yi Sun-Shin is initialed as YS-S). This is in accordance with AMA style.

• Authors may acknowledge people who may have assisted with the research study but do not qualify as authors.

• Authors are also encouraged to disclose "nonhuman" assistance by documenting the use of machine learning, artificial intelligence (AI), language models, and/or similar technology or tools for the purposes of information gathering, analyses, content creation, manuscript writing and/or editing in the Acknowledgments section (as well as in the Methods section, if relevant to the study design). See examples below. 

• If an article has been approved for discount or waiver (ie, APF support), include the following statement in the Acknowledgements section, per our Editorial policy: 

  "All authors declared that they had insufficient funding to support open access publication of this manuscript, including from affiliated organizations or institutions, funding agencies, or other organizations. JMIR Publications provided article processing fee (APF) support for the publication of this article."

   

• Notes:
  • Author contributions do NOT belong in the Acknowledgments section (move them under a separate heading; see What is the "Authors' Contributions" section? How should I write mine?).
  • Similarly, conflicts of interest should be disclosed in the Conflicts of Interest section, NOT in the Acknowledgments; see How should the "Conflicts of Interest" section be formatted? 

Examples:

Acknowledgments
We are grateful to Dr Mary Batia for her assistance with the recruitment phase.

We thank Prof J Smith for assistance with proofreading and image editing. 

We used the generative AI tool ChatGPT by OpenAI* to draft questions for the research survey, which were further reviewed and revised by the study group. The original ChatGPT transcripts are made available as Multimedia Appendix.

Figures 1 and 3 were created using the generative AI tool DALL-E by OpenAI*.

*Insert a new reference citation to the software/tool (or the generated image) if not previously cited in the main text.

Funding (mandatory)

JMIR Publications requires authors to declare funding sources, adhering to COPE guidance on declaring funding sources for research. This should be included in a separate Funding section.

Note: The section heading should be titled “Funding” (not “Funding Statement”). 

Funding sources for the research should be present separately to the Conflicts of Interest disclosure statement, in accordance with COPE guidance.

Many funding bodies have their own specifications for funding statements. It is the responsibility of the authors comply with the funding source's requirements. 

Declaring funder involvement is strongly recommended for inclusion as well. Authors may wish to declare if any funder or funding body played a role in the study design, data collection, analysis, interpretation of results, or the writing of the manuscript. If so, describe the nature and extent of their involvement. If they were not involved, this should be added: "The funder had no involvement in the study design, data collection, analysis, interpretation, or the writing of the manuscript."

If there is no funding for the work, authors should include the following statement. 

"The authors declared no financial support was received for this work."

This applies to all article types (including viewpoints and research letters) but may be optional for editorial material (eg, Editorial, Guest Editorial, Letter to the Editor/Author Reply, Commentary).

Examples:

Related

• Do you allow the the use of ChatGPT or other generative language models and how should this be reported?
• How should the "Conflicts of Interest" section be formatted?