The Acknowledgments section specifies any persons, organizations, and/or funding sources/grants the authors wish to mention. This is not a required section, but is included in the final publication if provided. 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), including any information placed under a “Funding” heading in the body of the text
- 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.
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Authors may acknowledge people who may have assisted with the research study but do not qualify as authors.
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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.
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If an article has been approved for a discount or waiver, the Acknowledgements of the final manuscript should include the following statement, per our Editorial policy: "All authors declared that they had insufficient or no 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.
This study would not have been possible without the support of the University of Toronto.
Funding for JK was provided by ABC Institute (grant 1434).
We used the generative AI tool ChatGPT (https://openai.com) 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.
We thank Prof J Smith for assistance with proofreading and image editing.
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