Authorship

All authors should have made substantial contributions to all of the following: (1) the conception and design of the study, or acquisition of data, or analysis and interpretation of data, (2) drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content, (3) final approval of the version to be submitted. It must be ensured that no person who meets the for scientific authorship has been ommitted from the list of authors.

Minor contributions such as suggestions related to references, data analysis or editing support, among others, do not guarantee authorship credits. These and other contributions to the paper may be recognized separately in  'Acknowledgements'.

Please note that AI tools, such as ChatGPT and other tools based on large language models cannot be listed as authors. For more information see the policy on Content generated by AI.

The opinions and facts included in each article are the sole responsibility of the authors, just as the ethic appropriateness of the same. Furthermore, authors must state explicitly that the authorship of the text is theirs and that the rights of intellectual property of any third party have been observed. Likewise, it is their responsibility to make sure they have the necessary authorizations to use, reproduce and print any material whose property belongs to a third party (tables, graphics, maps, diagrams, photographs, etc.). By sending an article for submission, authors accept that the work is original and has not been sent for consideration to or has been published in any other journal.

To avoid any possible confusion with the authors’ names and to guarantee the adequate attribution of publications and quotes, the journal requires the ORCID ID from all involved authors. Although, by itself, this cannot guarantee completely a correct identification, the adoption of ORCID constitutes an additional form of control against authorial fraud.

Any addition, deletion or rearrangement of author names in the authorship list should be made only before the manuscript has been accepted and only if approved by the Editor-in-Chief. To request such a change, the Editor-in-Chief must receive the following from the corresponding author:

(a) the reason for the change in author list and

(b) written confirmation (e-mail, letter) from all authors that they agree with the addition, removal or rearrangement. In the case of addition or removal of authors, this includes confirmation from the author being added or removed.

Once a manuscript has been accepted, the incorporation, exclusion or reorganization of the contributors’ list will only be considered in exceptional circumstances. The publication of the article will stop while the request with the changes is evaluated. If the manuscript is published online already, the changes appertaining to a granted request will be introduced in a correction note.

Author contribution statement

For transparency, we encourage authors to submit an ‘Author Contribution' statement outlining their individual contributions to the paper using CRediT (Contributor Roles Taxonomy). 

The 'Author Contribution' statement should include the names of all authors and their CRediT role(s). EJFB encourages authors to specify their contributions in this way.

CRediT information should be provided during the submission process. Below are the definitions of the Contributor Roles Taxonomy:

Term	Definition
Conceptualization	Ideas; formulation or evolution of overarching research goals and aims
Methodology	Development or design of methodology; creation of models
Software	Programming, software development; designing computer programs; implementation of the computer code and supporting algorithms; testing of existing code components
Validation	Verification, whether as a part of the activity or separate, of the overall replication/ reproducibility of results/experiments and other research outputs
Formal analysis	Application of statistical, mathematical, computational, or other formal techniques to analyze or synthesize study data
Investigation	Conducting a research and investigation process, specifically performing the experiments, or data/evidence collection
Resources	Provision of study materials, reagents, materials, patients, laboratory samples, animals, instrumentation, computing resources, or other analysis tools
Data Curation	Management activities to annotate (produce metadata), scrub data and maintain research data (including software code, where it is necessary for interpreting the data itself) for initial use and later reuse
Writing - Original Draft	Preparation, creation and/or presentation of the published work, specifically writing the initial draft (including substantive translation)
Writing - Review & Editing	Preparation, creation and/or presentation of the published work by those from the original research group, specifically critical review, commentary or revision – including pre-or postpublication stages
Visualization	Preparation, creation and/or presentation of the published work, specifically visualization/ data presentation
Supervision	Oversight and leadership responsibility for the research activity planning and execution, including mentorship external to the core team
Project administration	Management and coordination responsibility for the research activity planning and execution
Funding acquisition	Acquisition of the financial support for the project leading to this publication

An example of 'Author Contribution' statement is the following:

Amaia Maseda: Conceptualization, Methodology, Software. Vanessa Diaz-Moriana: Data curation, Writing- Original draft preparation. Remedios Hernández-Linares: Visualization, Investigation. Valeriano Sanchez-Famoso: Supervision. Txomin Iturralde: Software, Validation. José Carlos Casillas: Writing- Reviewing and Editing.

If authors have  equal contribution, the statement should say: These authors contributed equally to the work.

This information should form part of the ‘Title Page’ file. The information will be published if the paper is accepted.

Conflicts of interest

Conflicts of interest easily identified are financial interests such as direct employment, payment for consultancies, participation in a company, salaries fees, patent exploitation or payment for lectures. However, there may also exist conflicts derived from friendships, intellectual rivalry, academic competition or personal beliefs. When sending an article for publication, all authors are required to declare any financial or personal involvement with any public or private institution that might influence (even if unintentionally) the results of their work. Likewise, authors must declare any non-financial relation that may cause a conflict of interest in their work (personal, academic, ideological, intellectual, political or religious).

Conflicts of interest, both financial and non-financial, must be notified when the article is submitted. The rationale behind this requisite is not to impede the publication of authors who potentially may have competing interests, but to ensure that these can be identified clearly, so that readers are able to judge if authors may be predisposed or influenced in their work.

At the end of the work, a note referred to as “Conflict of interest” will be published. If no conflict exist, the note included will appear as 'None'.