“Author guidelines” — sometimes called “instructions for authors” or “guide for authors,” depending on the publisher — is the document a journal or publisher issues telling contributors exactly what a submission must include and how it must be formatted before an editor will even send it out for review. It is not the same thing as authorship criteria, which answer a narrower question (who qualifies to be listed as an author at all); author guidelines are broader, covering everything from reference style to conflict-of-interest disclosure to figure resolution. Confusing the two is one of the most common reasons a manuscript comes back with a formatting-only rejection rather than a substantive review.
This guide covers what author guidelines typically require across journals and disciplines, why they vary between publishers, and — the part most generic writing advice skips — how the standards infrastructure behind modern research publishing (ICMJE, COPE, ORCID, and the CRediT taxonomy) has turned what used to be a page of prose instructions into something closer to a structured metadata checklist.
What author guidelines usually cover
No two journals’ guidelines are worded identically, but the substantive requirements cluster around the same handful of categories almost everywhere:
Authorship and contributorship
Most guidelines now state, or link out to, an authorship policy — commonly the ICMJE’s four-part authorship test (substantial contribution; drafting or critical review; final approval; accountability) even outside medicine, since ICMJE’s criteria have become the de facto cross-disciplinary baseline. A growing number of journals separately require a CRediT contribution statement — a structured breakdown of what each named author actually did, using the 14 standardized roles of the CRediT taxonomy (ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022). Authorship and contributorship are related but distinct: CRediT documents what someone did; it does not by itself decide whether that work clears the bar for authorship.
Conflicts of interest and funding disclosure
Nearly every journal requires a conflict-of-interest (COI) declaration from every author, plus a funding statement naming the supporting grants and agencies. This is one of the more mechanically strict requirements — omitting it is a common cause of an editorial-office desk rejection before peer review even starts.
Data, code, and materials availability
A data availability statement, and increasingly a separate code availability statement, is now standard in guidelines across most quantitative and life-science fields, reflecting funder and journal open-science mandates that predate but are reinforced by initiatives like FAIR data.
Ethics approval and consent
For human-subjects or animal research, guidelines require a statement identifying the approving ethics/IRB body and protocol reference, and — for identifiable participant data or images — documented consent.
Figures, images, and reference style
Technical formatting requirements — resolution/DPI thresholds, acceptable file formats, citation style (Vancouver, APA, journal-specific) — are covered in detail in CASRAI’s guide to scientific figure rules for journal submission. Image manipulation and duplication checks increasingly sit alongside these formatting rules rather than being treated as a separate integrity process.
AI-assistance disclosure
Since ICMJE’s May 2023 update and equivalent COPE guidance, most author guidelines now explicitly address generative-AI use: it must be disclosed (typically in the methods or acknowledgments), and an AI tool cannot be listed as an author, since it cannot take accountability for the work. See CASRAI’s dictionary entry on author responsibility for AI use.
ORCID iD, cover letter, and administrative items
Many journals now require or strongly encourage an ORCID iD for the corresponding author (and increasingly all authors), submitted alongside a cover letter that states the manuscript is original, not under review elsewhere, and — where relevant — names suggested or excluded reviewers.
Why guidelines vary between journals and publishers
There’s no single global “author guidelines” standard, and that’s by design rather than an oversight. What does exist is a layered set of reference frameworks that individual publishers draw on and adapt:
- ICMJE’s Recommendations are the closest thing to a common baseline for biomedical and health-sciences journals, and are voluntarily followed well beyond ICMJE’s own member journals.
- COPE’s Core Practices shape the ethics-and-integrity side of guidelines (authorship disputes, retraction handling, data fabrication) across a much broader membership — roughly 13,000 member journals and publishers span every discipline, not just medicine.
- Discipline norms account for the rest of the variation: a physics preprint-friendly journal’s guidelines look very different from a clinical trial journal’s, because the underlying research outputs, ethical stakes, and reader expectations differ.
A publisher’s own house style — reference formatting, word limits, section order — sits on top of all of that and is the part that genuinely differs manuscript to manuscript, which is why “read the actual guidelines for the specific journal you’re submitting to” remains the one piece of advice that never stops being true.
The shift toward structured, machine-readable metadata
The most consequential recent change in author guidelines isn’t a new rule — it’s a format shift. Where a journal used to ask authors to write out authorship, funding, and COI information as free-text paragraphs, an increasing number of submission systems now capture this as structured data at the point of submission: ORCID iDs resolved against the ORCID registry, CRediT roles selected from a fixed taxonomy rather than typed in prose, and funder/grant identifiers matched against registries like Crossref’s Funder Registry. This matters beyond convenience — structured authorship and contribution data is what lets a contribution get correctly attributed and machine-matched across a researcher’s ORCID record, an institution’s CRIS, and a funder’s reporting system, rather than existing only as unstructured text on one PDF. CASRAI has stewarded the CRediT taxonomy since 2014; it became a formal ANSI/NISO standard (Z39.104-2022) in 2022, which is precisely the kind of standardization that makes this cross-system matching reliable rather than a manual reconciliation exercise.
Common reasons manuscripts are returned for guideline non-compliance
- Missing or incomplete COI/funding statements — one of the most frequent editorial-office rejection triggers, because it’s checked before substantive review starts.
- An author list that doesn’t match who actually meets the journal’s stated authorship criteria, or a missing CRediT statement where one is required.
- Figures below the required resolution or in an unsupported file format.
- No data or code availability statement where the journal mandates one, or a statement that doesn’t match what the journal’s policy actually requires (e.g., “available on request” where public deposit is mandated).
- Undisclosed generative-AI use in drafting or figure generation.
- Reference style, word count, or section structure that doesn’t match the target journal — often a sign the manuscript was adapted from a previous submission to a different journal without a full guidelines re-check.
How to use a journal’s author guidelines effectively
- Read the current guidelines on the publisher’s own site for the specific journal — not a summary, and not what you remember from a previous submission, since these documents are revised periodically.
- Confirm every named author meets the journal’s stated authorship criteria before finalizing the byline, and prepare the contribution statement in parallel if CRediT is required.
- Gather COI, funding, ethics-approval, and data/code-availability statements as a checklist item early — these are usually collected as separate submission-system fields, not embedded in the manuscript text.
- Check figure specifications against the guidelines before final formatting, not after — resizing and re-exporting late in the process is a common source of last-minute delay.
- Confirm ORCID iDs for all required authors are linked and current in the submission system.
Frequently asked questions
Are “author guidelines” and “authorship criteria” the same thing?
No. Authorship criteria (most commonly ICMJE’s four-part test) answer who qualifies to be listed as an author. Author guidelines are the full set of a journal’s submission requirements, of which authorship criteria are only one component alongside formatting, disclosures, and ethics documentation.
Where do I find a journal’s author guidelines?
On the individual journal’s own website, usually under a page titled “Author Guidelines,” “Instructions for Authors,” or “Guide for Authors” — always check the specific target journal directly rather than relying on a publisher-wide template, since individual journals under the same publisher can vary.
Do author guidelines cover peer review or is that separate?
Author guidelines primarily govern what authors must submit and how. Peer review process and reviewer conduct are typically addressed in separate editorial/reviewer policies, though the two are closely linked — see CASRAI’s entry on the journal reviewer role.
What happens if a submission doesn’t follow the guidelines?
Most commonly an editorial-office desk rejection or a request to correct and resubmit before the manuscript is even sent to reviewers — guideline compliance is typically checked administratively before substantive review begins.
For the broader authorship and contribution-credit landscape this guide sits within, see CASRAI’s CRediT and authorship overview.
