What does it mean when a journal is asking for declarations?

Question

I want to submit my first paper as a Ph.D. student to this journal and in the guidelines section, the journal ask for a declarations section to be included in the paper. I don't know how this section should look like since I've never seen one in a paper before, at least I don't recall I did. anyone have an idea how to go about it maybe some examples should be nice.

Answer 1

There are a set of legal, ethical, and contractual obligations that every scientist is required to abide by. Many journals specifically ask about key aspects of these as a "checklist" to help ensure that the papers that they publish are consistent with these obligations.

In the guidelines that you link to, the declarations align with these categories as follows:

Legal:

• Ethics approval, Consent to participate, Consent for publication: if you're doing a biomedical study, these are absolutely ethically required and often legally required as well.

Contractual:

• Funding: Somebody probably paid for this research, and the funder likely included a contractual requirement to acknowledge that funding, often with very specific language.

Ethical:

• Conflicts of interest/Competing interests: If your paper might have the effect of promoting or defending a company's product, your readers need to know that fact. Think about smoking research funded by tobacco companies.
• Availability of data and material: Necessary for open science and reproducibility.
• Code availability: Same as for data.
• Authors' contributions: This is part of the move from guessing significance by author order into a more organized "movie credits" explanation of why people are on the author lists.