All manuscripts must contain the following sections under the heading 'Declarations':
- Ethics and Consent
- Availability of data and materials
- Competing interests
- Funding
- Authors' contributions
- Acknowledgements
- Authors' information (optional)
Please see below for details on the information to be included in these sections.
If any of the sections are not relevant to your manuscript, please include the heading and write 'Not applicable' for that section.
Ethics and Consent
If a study involves Human Subjects and/or Human Subjects Data, IRB approval information should be included. For more information please visit our editorial policies for a full explanation of Ethics and consent.
The name of the ethics committee and the reference number should be reported.
If a study has been granted an ethics approval exemption, this should also be detailed in the manuscript (including the name of the ethics committee that granted the exemption).
Ethics approval and consent to participate statements can take one of the following forms (or a combination of more than one if required for multiple datasets):
- This research was conducted under the approval and supervision of XX University Institutional Review Board (IRB Approval No: YYY-ZZZ-QQQ) regarding ethical issues including consent to participate.
- This study was approved by the YYY Research Ethics Committee of YYY agency (Approval No. XYZ987)
Consent for Publication
For all manuscripts that include details, images, or videos relating to an individual person, written informed consent for the publication of these details must be obtained from that person (or their parent or legal guardian in the case of children under 18). The consent must be for publication of their details under the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 (such that they will be freely available on the internet). If the person has died, consent for publication must be obtained from their next of kin. The manuscript must include a statement that written informed consent for publication was obtained.
Human Research Participant Publication Approval Templates: English / German - can be used to obtain consent from human research participants/patients where there may be identifiable information and/or media. The consent form must state that the details/images/videos will be freely available on the internet and may be seen by the general public.
In cases where images are entirely unidentifiable and there are no details on individuals reported within the manuscript, consent for publication of images may not be required. The final decision on whether consent to publish is required lies with the Editor.
Further information, including Third Party Rights for dissemination, is available on the Springer Nature pages.
Availability of data and materials
Research Data Policy and Data Availability Statements
This journal follows Springer Nature research data policy. Sharing of all relevant research data is strongly encouraged and authors must add a Data Availability Statement to original research articles.
Research data includes a wide range of types, including spreadsheets, images, textual extracts, archival documents, video or audio, interview notes or any specialist formats generated during research.
Data availability statements
All original research must include a data availability statement. This statement should explain how to access data supporting the results and analysis in the article, including links/citations to publicly archived datasets analysed or generated during the study. Please see our full policy here.
If it is not possible to share research data publicly, for instance when individual privacy could be compromised, this statement should describe how data can be accessed and any conditions for reuse. Participant consent should be obtained and documented prior to data collection. See our guidance on sensitive data for more information.
When creating a data availability statement, authors are encouraged to consider the minimal dataset that would be necessary to interpret, replicate and build upon the findings reported in the article.
Further guidance on writing a data availability statement, including examples, is available at: Data availability statements
Data repositories
Authors are strongly encouraged to deposit their supporting data in a publicly available repository. Sharing your data in a repository promotes the integrity, discovery and reuse of your research, making it easier for the research community to build on and credit your work.
See our data repository guidance for information on finding a suitable repository.
We recommend the use of discipline-specific repositories where available. For a number of data types, submission to specific public repositories is mandatory.
See our list of mandated data types.
The journal encourages making research data available under open licences that permit reuse. The journal does not enforce use of particular licences in third party repositories. You should ensure you have necessary rights to share any data that you deposit in a repository.
Data citation
The journal recommends that authors cite any publicly available data on which the conclusions of the paper rely. This includes data the authors are sharing alongside their publication and any secondary data the authors have reused. Data citations should include a persistent identifier (such as a DOI), should be included in the reference list using the minimum information recommended by DataCite (Dataset Creator, Dataset Title, Publisher [repository], Publication Year, Identifier [e.g. DOI, Handle, Accession or ARK]) and follow journal style.
See our further guidance on citing datasets.
Research data and peer review
If the journal that you are submitting to uses double-anonymous peer review and you are providing reviewers with access to your data (for example via a repository link, supplementary information or data on request), it is strongly suggested that the authorship in the data is also anonymised. There are data repositories that can assist with this and/or will create a link to mask the authorship of your data.
Support with research data policy
Authors who need help understanding our data sharing policy, finding a suitable data repository, or organising and sharing research data can consult our Research Data Helpdesk for guidance.
See our FAQ page for more information on Springer Nature’s research data policy
Competing interests
All financial and non-financial competing interests must be declared in this section. See our editorial policies for a full explanation of competing interests. If you are unsure whether you or any of your co-authors have a competing interest please contact the editorial office.
Funding
All sources of funding for the research reported should be declared. If the funder has a specific role in the conceptualization, design, data collection, analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript, this should be declared.
Authors' contributions
The individual contributions of authors to the manuscript should be specified in this section.
Acknowledgements
Please acknowledge anyone who contributed towards the article who does not meet the criteria for authorship including anyone who provided professional writing services or materials.
Authors should obtain permission to acknowledge from all those mentioned in the Acknowledgements section.
See our editorial policies for a full explanation of acknowledgements and authorship criteria.
Group authorship: if you would like the names of the individual members of a collaboration Group to be searchable through their individual PubMed records (where applicable), please ensure that the title of the collaboration Group is included on the title page and in the submission system and also include collaborating author names as the last paragraph of the “Acknowledgements” section. Please add authors in the format First Name, Middle initial(s) (optional), Last Name. You can add institution or country information for each author if you wish, but this should be consistent across all authors.
Authors' information
You may choose to use this section to include any relevant information about the author(s) that may aid the reader's interpretation of the article, and understand the standpoint of the author(s). This may include details about the authors' qualifications, current positions they hold at institutions or societies, or any other relevant background information. Please refer to authors using their initials. Note this section should not be used to describe any competing interests.
Footnotes
Footnotes should be designated within the text using a superscript number. It is not allowed to use footnotes for references/citations.
