Your study is finished and your cover letter is written, but the submission portal is now asking for a string of statements you may never have thought about: competing interests, funding, author contributions, data availability. These are the author declarations, and a missing or careless one is among the most common reasons a manuscript is returned by the editorial office before review.
The good news is that declarations are formulaic. Once you know what each one is for and what good wording looks like, you can complete them in minutes. This guide walks through every declaration a journal submission typically requires, with a copy-ready example for each.
reputable journal now requires explicit declarations. Editors treat them as a transparency signal — incomplete or evasive statements raise concern about the rest of the work.
Declarations sit alongside the other moving parts of a clean submission. If you have not already, run through our complete journal submission checklist so the declarations are not the only thing standing between your paper and a reviewer.
Declarations usually appear in two places, and they must agree. The first is inside the manuscript itself, typically in a section after the conclusion and before the references. The second is in the submission portal, where the system asks you to enter or confirm the same information field by field. Editors and production staff cross-check the two, so a competing-interests statement that says one thing in the paper and another in the portal creates an immediate query. Decide your wording once, then use it consistently in both places.
Most journals follow guidance from ICMJE and COPE, so the same handful of declarations appear across publishers. Replace every [bracketed detail] with your own.
Disclose anything a reasonable reader might see as influencing your work — funding from an interested party, consultancy, board membership, patents, or personal relationships. If there are none, say so explicitly; silence is not the same as a declaration.
The authors declare [no competing interests]. — or — Author [X] has received consulting fees from [Company]. The remaining authors declare no competing interests.
State who funded the work and include grant numbers exactly as the funder requires; indexing services and research offices read this field. If the work was unfunded, say that too.
This work was supported by [Funder] under grant number [XXXX]. — or — This research received no specific grant from any funding agency.
Many journals use the CRediT taxonomy to make each author's role explicit. This pre-empts authorship disputes and clarifies accountability. For the rules on who qualifies as an author, see our guide to co-authorship and author order.
[Author A]: conceptualisation, methodology, writing — original draft. [Author B]: data curation, formal analysis. [Author C]: supervision, writing — review and editing.
Studies involving humans or animals need an ethics statement naming the approving committee and approval number, plus a consent statement for human participants. This is non-negotiable and a frequent cause of return. Our dedicated guide covers how to write an ethics statement in full.
The study was approved by the [Committee] (ref. [XXXX]). Informed consent was obtained from all participants.
State where the data sit — in a repository, within the article, or available on reasonable request — and name the repository and accession code where relevant. "Available on request" is acceptable at many journals but increasingly less favoured than open deposit.
The data supporting this study are openly available in [Repository] at [DOI/URL]. — or — The data are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
Most publishers now require you to disclose any use of generative AI tools in preparing the manuscript, and AI cannot be listed as an author. Be specific about what was used and for what purpose.
During preparation, the authors used [tool] for [purpose, e.g. language editing]. The authors reviewed and edited the output and take full responsibility for the content.
Common Mistake
Writing "not applicable" for ethics when your study clearly involved human participants, or leaving the competing-interests field blank. Both read as red flags to editors and routinely trigger a return without review.
"Declarations are not paperwork to rush — they are the first evidence an editor sees that your research can be trusted."
It is worth remembering why journals take these statements so seriously. Inaccurate or omitted declarations are not just an administrative slip; under COPE guidance they can lead to corrections or, in serious cases, retraction long after publication. A few careful minutes at submission protect both your paper and your reputation for years afterwards.
Treat declarations as a fixed checklist you complete for every submission rather than something to improvise in the portal. Draft all of them in a single document while the details are fresh, confirm each one against the target journal's Guide for Authors, and make sure the statements in your manuscript match what you enter into the submission system — mismatches between the two are a quiet but common cause of editorial queries.
One more habit pays off later: keep a short record of the exact ethics approval reference, funder grant numbers, and data repository links for each project. These details are easy to find while the work is recent and surprisingly hard to reconstruct months later when a paper is finally ready to submit or when a reviewer asks you to confirm them. A two-line note saved with the project file removes that scramble entirely.
Pro Tip
Keep a personal "declarations template" with your standard wording for funding, contributions, and competing interests. For each new submission you adjust only the journal-specific details — turning a nervous task into a two-minute one.
Our readiness scorecard flags absent compliance statements before an editor does.
Getting author declarations for journal submission right is part of presenting a clean, credible manuscript. Our Submission Support service helps you complete and align every declaration so nothing is returned on a compliance technicality. The research and its disclosures remain entirely yours; we make sure they are complete and correctly placed.
Bring your manuscript and target journal to a free consultation, and we'll make sure every required declaration is present, correct, and consistent.
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