Authorship Criteria

Authorship Criteria

AL-ARBAH: Journal of Islamic Finance and Banking is committed to transparent and accountable authorship. This policy follows the guidelines of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and the authorship recommendations of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE). It applies to every manuscript submitted to the journal.

1. Who Qualifies as an Author

Authorship should be limited to those who have made a significant intellectual contribution to the work. Each person listed as an author must meet all four of the following criteria:

  1. Substantial contribution to the conception or design of the study, or to the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data.
  2. Drafting the manuscript or revising it critically for important intellectual content.
  3. Final approval of the version to be submitted and published.
  4. Accountability for all aspects of the work, including making sure that questions about the accuracy or integrity of any part are properly investigated and resolved.

Everyone who meets these criteria should be listed as an author. Anyone who does not meet all four should be acknowledged instead (see Section 4).

2. Author Contribution Statement

Authors are required to state each author’s contribution using the CRediT (Contributor Roles Taxonomy) categories:

  • Conceptualization
  • Methodology
  • Software
  • Validation
  • Formal analysis
  • Investigation
  • Resources
  • Data curation
  • Writing – original draft
  • Writing – review & editing
  • Visualization
  • Supervision
  • Project administration
  • Funding acquisition

The statement is placed before the References section. For example:

Author 1: Conceptualization, Methodology, Writing – original draft. Author 2: Formal analysis, Writing – review & editing. Author 3: Supervision, Validation.

3. Order of Authors

The order of authors should be a joint decision of all co-authors and should be agreed before submission. The first author is normally the person who made the greatest contribution to the work. Authors must be prepared to explain the order of authorship if asked by the editor.

4. Contributors Who Do Not Qualify as Authors

Contributions that do not on their own justify authorship include:

  • acquisition of funding only
  • general supervision of a research group or administrative support only
  • technical assistance, data entry, translation, or language editing
  • providing access to research sites or respondents

These contributors should be named in the Acknowledgments section, with their permission.

5. Unacceptable Authorship Practices

The journal does not accept:

  • Ghost authorship: leaving out a person who meets the authorship criteria.
  • Guest or gift authorship: listing a person who does not meet the criteria, for example because of seniority, position, or to increase the chance of acceptance.
  • Purchased or traded authorship: selling or exchanging author positions.

Manuscripts in which any of these practices are found will be handled according to COPE flowcharts and may be rejected or retracted.

6. Articles Derived from Theses or Dissertations

When an article is derived from a student’s thesis or dissertation:

  • The student should normally be listed as the first author.
  • Supervisors may be listed as co-authors only if they meet the authorship criteria in Section 1.
  • The article should state that it is derived from a thesis or dissertation, including the institution and year.

7. Corresponding Author

One author is designated as the corresponding author. The corresponding author is responsible for:

  • communicating with the journal throughout submission, peer review, and publication
  • making sure that all co-authors have seen and approved the final version of the manuscript and agree to its submission
  • making sure that all author names, affiliations, ORCID iDs, and email addresses are complete and correct
  • disclosing any conflicts of interest and funding sources for all authors
  • responding to questions about the work after publication

8. Changes to Authorship

The author list should be final at the time of submission. Any request to add, remove, or reorder authors after submission must be sent by the corresponding author to the editor before the manuscript is accepted. The request must include:

  • the reason for the change
  • written confirmation, by email or signed letter, from all authors, including the author being added or removed

Changes after acceptance or publication will be considered only in exceptional cases, through a correction notice.

9. Artificial Intelligence and Authorship

Artificial intelligence (AI) tools, including large language models and chatbots, cannot be listed as authors. They cannot take responsibility for the work, approve the final version, or be held accountable for its integrity. Authors who use AI tools in preparing a manuscript must disclose this use in the Methods or Acknowledgments section, in line with the journal’s AI Usage Policy, and remain fully responsible for the content.

10. Authorship Disputes

Authorship disputes should be resolved among the authors before submission. If a dispute arises during review or after publication, the journal does not judge the merits of the dispute. The editor will:

  • follow the relevant COPE flowchart
  • pause processing of the manuscript if necessary
  • refer the matter to the authors’ institution(s) for investigation where appropriate

11. Author Responsibilities

By submitting a manuscript, all authors confirm that:

  • the work is original
  • it has not been published and is not under consideration elsewhere
  • all sources are properly cited
  • the similarity level does not exceed the limit set by the journal’s plagiarism screening policy

Authors share collective responsibility for the content of the published article.