Authors Guidelines

Types of Manuscripts Published

Manuscripts submitted for publication in the Journal of Agricultural and Marine Sciences must be based on original work and have not been published, accepted for publication, or submitted for publication elsewhere. The journal accepts the following types of manuscripts:

Editorial (by invitation only)
Review (Review paper not exceeding 6000 words or 14 printed pages including figures)
Mini Review (Mini Review paper not exceeding 3000 words or 7 printed pages including figures)
Research Article (Original research not exceeding 6000 words or 14 printed pages including figures)
Agricultural and Marine Science Education Article (Original research not exceeding 6000 words or 14 printed pages including figures)
Case Study (Case study not exceeding 3000 words or 7 printed pages including figures)
Technical Note (Original research not exceeding 3000 words or 6 printed pages including figures)
Perspective (Short paper not exceeding 2000 words or 4 printed pages, that present an opinion or a novel interpretation of an existing idea)
Snapshot (Single page paper focusing on a high-quality illustration with limited references (up to 5))
Letter to Editor (Short views, not exceeding 2000 words or 4 printed pages, that present an opinion on an article or a novel or critical interpretation of existing ideas)
Book Review (Short evaluation of any recent books published in Agricultural Sciences)
Erratum/Corrigendum (Any error(s) or mistake(s) of a published paper in the JAMS)

Description of Manuscript Published

The journal accepts several types of articles and recommends the following submission length and subsections:

Editorial (by invitation only)

Editorials should not exceed 2000 words and a maximum of 25 references.

Review

Reviews should not exceed 6000 words and 14 printed pages and approximately 100 References. Authors who would like to submit a review are requested to send to the Editor-in-Chief (shafiur@squ.edu.om and squjams@squ.edu.om) a one-page letter of intention outlining the focus and scope of the projected review before submitting their review online. The sections could be made based on the topic and rational.

Mini Review

Reviews should not exceed 3000 words and 7 pages and approximately 50 References. Authors who would like to submit a review are requested to send to the Editor-in-Chief (shafiur@squ.edu.om and squjams@squ.edu.om) a one-page letter of intention outlining the focus and scope of the projected review before submitting their review online. The sections could be made based on the topic and rational.

Research Article

Research papers should not exceed 6000 words or 14 pages and 50 references. These should be divided into the following 6 sections: Abstract, Introduction, Materials and Methods, Results, Discussion and References, Acknowledgements, Conclusions or Recommendations can also be included. Although merging results and discussion is possible, it is not a structure encouraged by the editorial board.

Agricultural and Marine Science Education Article

Agricultural science education article should not exceed 6000 words or 14 pages and 30 references. These should be divided into the 6 sections as mentioned above in the case of research papers.

Case Study

Case studies not exceeding 3000 words or 7 printed pages including figures, and 20 references. This should have a description of a case, and then analysis and critical evaluations of different aspects of the case.

Technical Note

Notes are short original research articles. They should not exceed 3000 words and 30 references or 6 printed pages. They should have the same overall structure as Research Articles including a structured abstract.

Perspective

Perspective papers are short papers that present an opinion or novel interpretation of existing ideas or data. They may also present an historical perspective on one of the themes of the journal. These manuscripts should follow a structure, and a logical sequence of sections related to the content and purpose of the paper.

Snapshot

A snapshot manuscript is a single page paper focusing on a high-quality illustration. The paper itself should not exceed one page and lists only a maximum of 3 references. Snapshot papers illustrate the common saying “One picture is worth a thousand words”. The topic of the paper should be based on high-quality photographic evidence of rare organisms, new records, unusual observation, severe pathology, etc. These submissions, because of their short nature, do not have abstracts. The illustration needs to have an accompanying legend.

Letter to Editor

Letter to editor should include short summary of any current issues in the field of Agricultural Sciences. It could also include critical evaluation of any paper published in the JAMS.

Book Review

Book review should include an evaluation of any recent books published in Agricultural Sciences. A cover photo of the book should be included.

Erratum/Corrigendum

Erratum/Corrigendum should include any error(s) or mistake(s) of a published paper in the JAMS. The details of the mistake(s) and its correction (s) need to be included clearly.

Submission Procedure

New manuscripts should be submitted online through the journal management system (https://www.editorialmanager.com/squ-jams). Note that authors who are not yet registered with the journal management system need to first create an identity by registering on the journal website (https://www.editorialmanager.com/squ-jams). Once registered, corresponding authors can log in with their chosen username and password.

Initial Evaluation

All submitted manuscripts will be checked by the Editorial Office to determine whether they are properly prepared and whether they follow the ethical policies of the journal. All submitted manuscripts are screened for potential plagiarism via iThenticate software. Manuscripts that do not fit the journal's ethics policy or do not meet the standards of the journal will be rejected before peer review. Incomplete manuscripts not prepared in the advised style will be sent back to authors without scientific review. After these checks, the Editorial Office will consult the journal’s Editor-in-Chief to determine whether the manuscript fits the scope of the journal and whether it is scientifically sound. Manuscripts with insufficient priority for publication will be rejected promptly. Please write your text in good English (American usage is accepted). The Editor reserves the right to reject a manuscript on the grounds of insufficient language quality. Reject decisions at this stage will be verified by the Editor-in-Chief.

Submission Checklist

The current submission has not been previously published nor is it currently submitted to another journal for consideration.
The submission text files are in Microsoft Office (.docx).
The text of the document uses a 12-point standard font with a 14-16 point leading (space between lines) on A4 or US-Letter format pages with page numbers and line numbers. The manuscript conforms to the journal recommended styles, length and number of sections.
The Abstract of the paper follows the structured format described in the guide for authors and includes a single paragraph (<300 words) including Introduction, Objective, Method, Results and Discussion, and Conclusion.
Include up to 6 keywords.
Photography (or photographic plates) are submitted in the jpeg (.jpg) file format at 300 dots per inch (dpi) with 80% compression quality or better. Line drawings and other figures should be preferably submitted as vector graphics such as pdf, eps or svg files. Alternatively, high resolution (600 dpi) image format are acceptable (PNG, TIFF, GIF).
All tables including (legend, description and footnotes) and all figure captions are part of the submission main text file.
The text adheres to the stylistic and bibliographic requirements outlined in this document, which can also be found in About the Journal on the Journal website.
The manuscript has been “spell-checked” and “grammar-checked.”

Language and Translation

The journal publishes papers in the English language with translation into Arabic of the title, authors, and abstract of all papers. Arabic speaking authors are invited to provide the editorial board with an Arabic translation of the title and abstract. For non-Arabic speakers, the board will provide a translation.

US English spelling, usage, and punctuation are used throughout the journal. Papers accepted for publication will be edited by the journal editorial office for conciseness, clarity, grammar, spelling, and style. Should the editing be extensive and possibly alter the intended meaning of the author(s), queries will be sent by email to the corresponding author requesting professional English editing and clarifications.

Manuscript structure

The Journal follows the overall evolution of scientific language. When preparing manuscripts please avoid jargon and long or complex sentences but aim at clear, concise and simple grammatical structures. The editorial board encourages the use of the active voice when it is appropriate.

Abstract

The Editorial board strongly suggests the use of a “structured abstract” not exceeding 300 words. These abstracts, although composed of a single paragraph, include 5 sections that summarize the content of the paper: Introduction; Objective; Methodology, Results and Discussion; Conclusion.

Preparation of the Manuscript

All papers will be typeset by the editorial team of the journal at publication time. Therefore, the editorial board requests the authors to follow a clear and simple format for their manuscript thereby facilitating the editorial processes.

The editorial board recommends the use of a classic typeface (Times, Helvetica, Garamond, Myriad-Pro, …) with 12-point size and at least 14-16 points leading (line spacing) for the text of the manuscript with minimum formatting as most of layout and typographical formats will be applied at the typesetting stage. The manuscript page size should be A4 and the editorial board recommends that a margin of at least 3 cm be included on all sides of the paper.

To facilitate the review process, the text of the submission should have line numbers in the left-hand margin restarting at 1 and a page number in the footer of the document. Use standard typographic conventions for the text presentation: italic typeface for species names (not underline), bold face for vectors, true superscript and subscripts when necessary. Emphasis is better marked through italic rather than bold face.

Typography

The journal uses standard typographic convention throughout. The editorial board recommends that you follow these in the preparation of the manuscript.

Italic should be used throughout for the Latin name of species (please do not use underlined text). Emphasis can be placed on some elements of text using bold face.

Abbreviations: Avoid non-standard abbreviations whenever possible, particularly in headings and subheading. If, for the sake of conciseness, the author wishes to use abbreviations, define each abbreviation when they first appear in each section of the manuscript. Standard abbreviation such as RNA, DNA, ATP, ADP, EDTA… do not need to be defined as most readers will be familiar with them. Others such as PAH (Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbon) or ICP (Inductively Coupled Plasma) should be defined as most readers may not be familiar with their meaning.

Units: Always use the International System of Units (SI) for all units. For large or small units use the standard multiplier prefix for the units (k for 1000, M for 1000000, m for 1/1000 and µ for 10-6). Prefer whenever possible negative exponents kg/m2. To separate units, use either a mid-line point or a non-breaking space. The abbreviated symbols (k, kg, s, P, W) should be used whenever possible and combined with Arabic numbers (5 kg, 2 m2, 5.2 MP, 6.78 MW h). The only exception is when a number is grammatically placed at the beginning of the sentence. A non-breaking space should be used between the number and its units to ensure that they stay together in the final document. The SI unit of time is s (second), h stands for hour, min for minute, d for days (day) and for annum (year).

When necessary, non-SI units can be added between parenthesis to allow comparison with older literature or traditional systems of measurements. This includes usual units, such as surface of farming units (faddan, acres, areas, hectares), or traditional depth units (fathoms, brasses) or distance (nautical miles, miles) or other non-SI units (gallons, inch, foot, bushels).

Illustrations

Illustrations should be numbered consecutively and embedded in the article file at the end. To ensure compatibility, the journal accepts the following file format: JPEG, TIFF, PNG, EPS and SVG. Although the journal is normally published in black and white, color illustrations can be used when color is clearly necessary to convey the intended message. Although the authors can suggest the inclusion of color figures in the paper, the final decision to include them or not is left to the editorial board. The editorial team will strive to provide the best possible graphic output from the material submitted by the authors and may in some cases decide to redraw some figures to improve readability. They may also request better quality photographs or color figures if necessary. Typically, black and white line figures should have a resolution of at least 600 dpi (at the final printed size) and color figures or photographs 300 dpi (at the final printed size) but should not exceed 10 MB. For line graphics, vector-based file formats (SVG, EPS) are preferred as they are resolution independent.

Each illustration should have at the bottom of the page a brief identifier such as the name of the first author, the word Figure and the sequential number of the figure. (Al-Oufi, Figure 7 for instance). The full captions of all figures should be presented in numerical order on a separate page at the end of the text manuscript.

In the figure use Helvetica as the standard typeface for all text (axis, legend, axis legend, equations, labels, etc.) and ensure that all text remains legible even after size reduction for final printing. Figures will be printed either as a single column (7 cm wide) or double column (14 cm).

Macro-photographs, Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) photographs, anatomical drawings, morphological illustrations, should have an appropriately labeled scale bar. Avoid multiplication factors (×100, ×10000) as these will change with the rescaling of the figure when printed.

Tables

Tables should be presented in a clear manner and designed to fit the width of a page. Exceptionally wide tables may be typeset in landscape, along the height of a printed page. All unnecessary decimals should be removed. Tables should be included at the end of the manuscript and the legend/caption of each table should be placed on the same page and above the table.

Equations and Numbers

Equations should be placed on separate lines and numbered sequentially at the end of the line. They should be typeset using an equation editor. The journal uses the modern scientific number styles recommended by the Council of Science Editors. This style uses digit numbers (1, 2,4.5, 7, etc.) for all numeric representations, even single digit ones. The main exceptions are when a digit starts a sentence, or when the single digit number is part of an idiomatic expression such as in “one or both”, a “zero-tolerance policy”, a “one-to-one interview”, “one has to agree that”.

References

Journal of Agricultural and Marine Sciences uses a variation of the Author-Date style of references.

In-text citations

Citation in the text should be either Name (date) or (Name date) depending on whether the authors of the cited paper have a grammatical function in the sentence or not. Note the absence of punctuation between the author and the date. When several references are grouped in a single inline citation, the different references are separated by a semi-colon (; ).
Jones et al. (2007) listed 4 main types of ……According to Jones et al. (2007), the main reason for……. The prevalence of coral parasites was considerably lower than that reported in Tanzanian coral reefs (Mwaniki, 1996).
Different papers that share the same in-text citation format (same authors and same year of publication) are identified by a small letter (a, b, c) following the date of publication. When used in a single citation, the author’s name is not repeated.
The ticks collected on camels were not different from those found on goats (Bobade, 2004a) or sheep (Bobade, 2004b). There were no differences in the species of ticks collected on different farm animals (Bobade, 2004a; 2004b).
The family name of the first author is always used. For publications with 2 authors, the 2 family names with the conjunction “and” are used followed by the year of publication. For more than 2 authors, the abbreviation et al. is used to replace all but the first author’s name.
Jones et al. (2007) listed 4 main types of soft coral communities…….. Al-Barwani and Jones (2005) found 3 genetically distinct populations of mussels…… The Omani clownfish has a distribution restricted to 400 km along the Arabian Sea coast of Oman (Simpson et al., 2014).

End of Text References

The bibliographic information for all cited references in the articles are listed at the end of the papers under the heading “References”. The list of references is sorted first following the alphabetical order of the authors and if necessary, by the date of publication. Please follow the examples shown below, including punctuation. The Journal names follow a “Title case” capitalization—all words are capitalized except for articles (a, an, the); for prepositions (against, of, in, to), for conjunctions (and, for, not, or)—and should NOT be abbreviated. Titles of articles, books, on the other hand follow a sentence case capitalization (i.e. words are capitalized according to the grammar of the language of publication): the first word, the first word that follow a colon or a semi colon, names of geographic locations, or proper nouns, etc. For articles published in non-English languages, provide the original title if the language uses roman characters or a translation of the title for other languages (Arabic for instance) and add the name of language between 2 periods at the end of the reference.

For online references, follow the overall same standard as for print publication, but include a date of access and if possible, a DOI number.
Volume and issues, if available, follow directly the Title of the Journal with the issue number between parentheses. Page numbers follow a colon and are separated by a hyphen. For books, the total page number is used with the abbreviation “pp.” whereas for sections of books, the abbreviation is “p.” followed by the range of pages of the section (p. 25-44). All references end with a period.

Journal reference with 1 author

Adams NA. (2001). UV radiation evokes negative phototaxis and covering behavior in the sea urchin Strongylocentrotus droebachiensis. Marine Ecology Progress Series 213: 87-95.

Journal reference with 2 authors

Zhou M, Huntley ME. (1997). Population dynamics theory of plankton based on biomass spectra. Marine Ecology Progress Series 159: 61-73.

Journal reference with article number

Adams NA. (2001). UV radiation evokes negative phototaxis and covering behavior in the sea urchin. Marine Ecology Progress Series 2013: 1-12 (Article 576).

Journal reference with more than 2 authors

Schlacher TA, Thompson l, Price S. (2007). Vehicles versus conservation of invertebrates on sandy beaches: Mortalities inflicted by off-road vehicles on ghost crabs. Marine Ecology 28: 354-367.

Whole book

Parsons TR, Maita Y, Lalli CM. (1984). A Manual of Chemical and Biological Methods for Seawater Analysis. Pergamon Press. New York: 173 pp.

Book chapter from an edited book

Brooks HA, Probert TH. (1984). Let’s ask GMDH what effect the environment has on fisheries. In: Farlow SJ, editor. Self-organizing Methods in Modeling. Gmdh Type Algorithms. Marcel Dekker, New York and Basel: p.169-178.

Report

Stransky C. (2001). Preliminary results of a shape analysis of redfish otoliths: Comparison of areas and species. Northwest Atlantic Fisheries Organization. NAFO SCR No. 4382.

Thesis

Al-Masroori HS. (2002). Trap ghost fishing problem in the area between Muscat and Barka (Sultanate of Oman); an evaluation study. M. Sc. Thesis, Sultan Qaboos University, Muscat, Oman.

Article not in English

Samimi NS. (2004). Soft-corals and gorgonians of the Iranian shore of the Strait of Hormuz. Iranian Journal of Oceanography 7(2): 45-49 (In Persian).

Conference proceedings

Campbell AC. (1988). The echinoderm fauna of Dhofar (southern Oman) excluding holothuroids. In: Burke RD, Mladenov PV, Lambert P, editors. Proceedings of the Sixth International Echinoderm Conference; 23-28 August 1987; Canada Victoria, Balkema, p. 369-378.

Supplementary Material

JAMS accepts electronic supplementary material to support published manuscripts. These may include high-resolution images, soundtracks, datasets and will be published online along with the electronic version of the published paper. Data should be provided in one of the supported formats (docx) for printable documents and standard formats for non-printable documents (AIFF, MP4, MP3, etc.).

Declaration

Includes authors’ contributions, ethical approval, if necessary, conflict of interest, funding source(s), and data availability. This should be placed before the References section. Please note that submissions that do not include required statements will be returned as incomplete.

Funding

Please describe any sources of funding that have supported the work. The statement should include details of any grants received (please give the name of the funding agency and grant number). Example statements: “This work was supported by […] (Grant numbers […] and […]). Author A.B. has received research support from Company A.”
“The authors declare that no funds, grants, or other support were received during the preparation of this manuscript.”

Competing Interests

Authors are required to disclose financial or non-financial (e.g. affiliations, personal relationships, intellectual property) interests that are directly or indirectly related to the work submitted for publication. Interests within the last 3 years of beginning the work (conducting the research and preparing the work for submission) should be reported. Interests outside the 3-year time frame must be disclosed if they could reasonably be perceived as influencing the submitted work.

Example statements: “Financial interests: Author A and B declare they have no financial interests. Author C has received speaker and consultant honoraria from Company M. Dr. C has received speaker honorarium and research funding from Company M and Company N. Author D has received travel support from Company O. Non-financial interests: Author D has served on advisory boards for Company M and Company N.” “The authors have no relevant financial or non-financial interests to disclose.” Please refer to the “Competing Interests” section below for more information on how to complete these sections.

Author Contributions

Authors are encouraged to include a statement that specifies the contribution of every author to the research and preparation of the manuscript.

Example statement: “All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation, data collection and analysis were performed by [full name], [full name] and [full name]. The first draft of the manuscript was written by [full name] and all authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.” Please refer to the “Authorship Principles ” section below for more information on how to complete this section.

Data Availability

This journal encourages authors to provide an optional statement of data availability in their article. Data Availability Statements should include information on where data supporting the results reported in the article can be found, including, where applicable, hyperlinks to publicly archived datasets analysed or generated during the study. Data availability statements can also indicate whether data are available on request from the authors and where no data are available, if appropriate.

Example statements:“The datasets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are available in the [NAME] repository, [PERSISTENT LINK TO DATASETS]” “The datasets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.”Please refer to the “Research Data Policy and Data Availability” section below for more information on how to complete this section.

In addition to the above, manuscripts that report the results of studies involving humans and/or animals should include the following declarations:

Ethics approval

Authors of research involving human or animal subjects should include a statement that confirms that the study was approved (or granted exemption) by the appropriate institutional and/or national research ethics committee (including the name of the ethics committee and reference number, if available). For research involving animals, their data or biological material, authors should supply detailed information on the ethical treatment of their animals in their submission. If a study was granted exemption or did not require ethics approval, this should also be detailed in the manuscript.

“This study was performed in line with the principles of the Declaration of Helsinki. Approval was granted by the Ethics Committee of University B (Date.../No....).”

“This is an observational study. The XYZ Research Ethics Committee has confirmed that no ethical approval is required.”

For detailed information on relevant ethical standards and criteria, please refer to the sections on “Research involving human participants, their data or biological material”, “Research involving animals, their data or biological material”.

Consent to participate

For all research involving human subjects, freely-given, informed consent to participate in the study must be obtained from participants (or their parent or legal guardian in the case of children under 16) and a statement to this effect should appear in the manuscript.

Example statement: “Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.” “Written informed consent was obtained from the parents.”

Please refer to the section on “Informed Consent” for additional help with completing this information.

Consent to publish

Individuals may consent to participate in a study, but object to having their data published in a journal article. If your manuscript contains any individual person’s data in any form (including any individual details, images or videos), consent for publication must be obtained from that person, or in the case of children, their parent or legal guardian. This is in particular applicable to case studies. A statement confirming that consent to publish has been received from all participants should appear in the manuscript.

Example statement:“The authors affirm that human research participants provided informed consent for publication of the images in Figure(s) 1a, 1b and 1c.”

Please refer to the section on “Informed Consent” for additional help with completing this information.

Proof

The gally proof of an accepted article is e-mailed in pdf format to the submitting/corresponding author for typographical checking only. It should be returned within 72 hours of receipt.

After acceptance

Upon acceptance, your article will be exported to production to undergo typesetting. Once the typesetting is complete, you will receive the proof.