1. Substantive Contribution: Authorship status is granted exclusively to individuals who make genuine intellectual, technical, and substantive contributions to the research or manuscript preparation. Name inclusion shall not be based on academic position, administrative seniority, laboratory ownership, personal relationships, or funding provision.
2. Honesty and Transparency: Authors must report authorship details accurately, including personal identities, institutional affiliations, specific research roles, and relationships among co-authors.
3. Scientific Accountability: Every listed author shares responsibility for their contributions and must cooperate fully to address inquiries concerning data precision, experimental validity, and overall content integrity.
4. Fairness and Recognition: All individuals meeting authorship criteria deserve appropriate credit. Conversely, individuals who fail to meet these criteria must not be listed as authors under any circumstances.
5. Academic Integrity: Authorship must remain free from manipulation, falsification of contributions, guest/gift additions, or the exclusion of legitimate contributors.

Criteria for Authorship Eligibility

1. Formulation of engineering problems, research objectives, or hypotheses.
2. Development of conceptual frameworks, mathematical models, system simulations, or engineering design.
3. Design of research methodology, Design of Experiments (DoE), or data collection protocols.
4. Execution of experiments, field/factory data collection, or laboratory testing.
5. Processing, statistical analysis, optimization, or synthesis of engineering data.
6. Formulation of engineering concepts, algorithms, critical arguments, or technical recommendations that form the core substance of the manuscript.

b. Drafting or Critical Technical Revision

c. Approval of Final Manuscript

d. Accountability for Work Integrity

Authorship Guidelines by Article Type

• Empirical / Experimental Research Papers: Authors must contribute to engineering problem definition, experimental design, field/lab testing, data analysis, result interpretation, and manuscript drafting/revision.
• Conceptual & System Modeling Papers: Authors must contribute to theoretical formulation, synthesis, mathematical/simulation model development, sensitivity analysis, and technical argumentation.
• Industrial Case Studies: Authors must contribute to problem mapping in industrial settings, engineering solution design, implementation/simulation, efficiency/impact analysis, and manuscript preparation.
• Systematic Literature Reviews: Authors must contribute to search protocol design, taxonomy development, research gap analysis, and future research mapping.
• Industry-Academia Collaborative Projects: Every team member must have an identifiable intellectual contribution. Participation in a project team or providing factory/lab facilities does not automatically grant authorship.

First Author, Co-Authors, and Corresponding Author

• First Author: The individual placed first in the author order by mutual agreement, having taken the lead role in conducting the study, analyzing data, and drafting the initial manuscript. Placement must reflect genuine contribution rather than seniority.
• Co-Authors: Individuals meeting all four authorship criteria who provide substantive technical or analytical contributions. All co-authors share academic responsibility for the publication's integrity.
• Corresponding Author: The designated author responsible for managing primary communication between the author team and JRI editors during submission, peer review, revision, and publication. Responsibilities include:
  1. Ensuring all authors approve the submission and final manuscript.
  2. Providing accurate author details, affiliations, and ORCID iDs.
  3. Uploading raw data, model scripts, or supplementary files upon request.
  4. Distributing editorial and reviewer feedback to all co-authors.
  5. Coordinating technical revisions and verifying final author consent.
  6. Ensuring any post-submission authorship modifications are formally agreed upon.

Determination of Author Order

• The sequence of author names is determined by mutual consensus based on relative intellectual and technical contributions.
• Author order must be agreed upon prior to manuscript submission to JRI. Discussions regarding author placement should begin early in the research planning phase.
• JRI does not prescribe that Academic Advisors, Department Chairs, Laboratory Heads, Plant Managers, or Deans be automatically placed as first or last authors. Administrative oversight alone does not qualify an individual for authorship.
• Any disputes regarding author ordering must be resolved internally by the co-authors through documented contribution records.

Authorship in Student, Faculty, and Industry Research

• For articles derived from Student Theses, Dissertations, Capstone Projects, or Industrial Consultancy Projects, authorship attribution must be based strictly on active contributions.
• Students who execute primary research and draft the manuscript are entitled to First Author or Co-Author status based on their contribution proportion. Faculty advisors qualify as co-authors if they provide substantive technical direction, critical revisions, and approve the final version.
• Supervisory roles or industry oversight do not grant automatic authorship rights without direct substantive engagement in manuscript development.

Non-Author Contributors (Acknowledgements)

1. Providing access to laboratory facilities, machinery, testing equipment, or industrial production data.
2. Technical support from lab technicians, operators, or data collectors without analytical interpretation.
3. Professional language editing, translation, proofreading, or graphic/CAD formatting.
4. Acquisition of research grants or financial sponsorship without involvement in research execution.
5. Administrative coordination or general logistical support.

Prohibited Authorship Practices

• Gift / Guest Authorship: Including individuals who made no substantive contribution (e.g., department heads, lab directors, or personal contacts).
• Ghost Authorship: Omitting individuals (e.g., students or junior researchers) who contributed substantively and meet authorship criteria.
• Honorary Authorship: Awarding authorship out of respect, courtesy, or professional leverage.
• Paid Authorship (Authorship Trading): Buying or selling authorship slots on manuscripts.
• Author Order Manipulation: Unilaterally altering author ordering without full co-author agreement.
• Unapproved Submission: Submitting a manuscript containing an individual's name without their explicit consent.

Author Contribution Statement (CRediT Taxonomy)

1. Conceptualization — Ideas; formulation or evolution of overarching research goals and aims.
2. Methodology — Development or design of methodology; creation of models/experiments.
3. Software — Programming, software development; designing computer programs; implementation of computer code and supporting algorithms; testing of existing code components.
4. Validation — Verification, whether as a part of the activity or separate, of the overall replication/reproducibility of results/experiments and other research outputs.
5. Formal analysis — Application of statistical, mathematical, computational, or other formal techniques to analyze or synthesize data.
6. Investigation — Conducting a research and investigation process, specifically performing the experiments, or data/evidence collection.
7. Resources — Provision of study materials, reagents, materials, laboratory samples, computing resources, or other analysis tools.
8. Data Curation — Management activities to annotate, scrub data, and maintain research data.
9. Writing – Original Draft — Preparation, creation, and/or presentation of the published work, specifically writing the initial draft.
10. 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.
11. Visualization — Preparation, creation, and/or presentation of the published work, specifically visualization/data presentation, system diagrams, or CAD models.
12. Supervision — Oversight and leadership responsibility for the research activity planning and execution, including mentorship.
13. Project administration — Management and coordination responsibility for the research activity planning and execution.
14. Funding acquisition — Acquisition of the financial support for the project leading to this publication.

Post-Submission Authorship Changes

Dispute Resolution and Misconduct Procedures

1. The Editorial Board will request written statements and supporting evidence (such as research logbooks, raw datasets, or email correspondence) from all parties involved.
2. Manuscript evaluation or publication will be paused during the inquiry.
3. Unresolved disputes requiring institutional investigation will be referred to the authors' home institutions or funding bodies.
4. Proven violations may result in manuscript rejection, formal retraction (if post-publication), or a ban on future submissions to JRI.

Compliance Statement