Author Guidelines

OPEN ACCESS POLICY

Acta Scientiarum. Agronomy is published under the Open Access model and is therefore free for anybody to read and download, and to copy and disseminate according to the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 policy. 

APCS (ARTICLE PROCESSING CHARGES) AND SUBMISSION CHARGES

Acta Scientiarum. Agronomy is free of any kind of submission/publication fees, thus the authors are not charged to publish with us.

POLICIES AGAINST PLAGIARISM AND BAD CONDUCT IN RESEARCH

In the wake of our tradition in excellence, we would like to inform collaborators on editorial improvements that foreground the integrity of articles published by the Acta Scientiarum. Following guidelines by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) stimulating the identification of the practice of plagiarism, bad practices, frauds, possible violations in Ethics and indicting, we would like to recommend the following:

1. Authors are invited to visit the COPE website http://publicationethics.org for information on authors and editors on Ethics in research;

2. Prior to submission of scientific articles, authors should follow the criteria below:

- articles that contain data acquisition or analysis and interpretation of data from other publications should refer to the latter explicitly and directly;

- articles with a critical review on the intellectual contents of other authors should duly quote the latter authors;

- all authors should attend to the authorship criteria of an unpublished article and no researcher involved in the investigation should be omitted from the list of authors;

- the definite approval of the article is the role of the respective editors and of the editorial board.

3. So that the above criteria could be complied with, the following procedures will be taken:

a)  Editors will evaluate manuscripts by CrossCheck system immediately after submission. Contents of the scientific articles will be evaluated to identify any sort of plagiarism, double submissions, already published articles and possible frauds in research;

b)  With these results in hand, the editors and the editorial board decide whether the manuscript is sent for the review of peers, who will also make their own evaluations;

c) After acceptance and prior to publication, the article may again be assessed.

INSTRUCTIONS TO AUTHORS AND STYLESHEET

1. Acta Scientiarum. Agronomy, ISSN 1807-8621 (online), is published four times a year by the Universidade Estadual de Maringá, Maringá, Paraná, Brazil.

2.  The journal publishes original articles in all areas of Agronomy, including soil sciences, agricultural entomology, soil fertility and manuring, soil physics, physiology of cultivated plants, phytopathology, phyto-health, phytotechny, genesis, morphology and soil classification, management and conservation of soil, integrated management of plant pests, vegetal improvement, agricultural microbiology, agricultural parasitology, production and processing of seeds.

3. Author(s) should state that the manuscript, reporting original work, was not sent, in part or in whole, for publication to another scientific journal. This statement may be found at http:// periodicos.uem.br/ojs/index.php/ActaSciAgron/about/submissions.

4. Data, concepts, opinions and the preciseness of works cited are the author’s/ authors’ entire responsibility. Mention of products and commercial trademarks do not imply in any recommendation for use by the journal’s editorial board.

5. Research should be based on the most advanced and state-of-the-art techniques. When necessary, a declaration of the institution’s Ethic and Bio-security Board should be attached.

6. Articles should be written in English. 

7. Articles will be reviewed by three peers acknowledged for their scientific production and research, from higher institutions in Brazil and abroad. After the necessary corrections and possible suggestions, the paper shall be accepted if two peers give a favorable statement; the article will be rejected if two peer reviews are unfavorable. 

8. Articles are to be sent via Internet through the ACTA homepage at http://www.periodicos.uem.br/ojs/

9. Conflict of interests may be personal, commercial, political, academic or financial. Conflict of interests occurs when authors, referees or editors have vested interests that may affect the writing or the evaluation of unpublished papers. Authors are requested that on submitting a paper for possible publication they should acknowledge or disclose financial conflicts or others that may have affected their scientific work. Authors should identify all financial funding given during the execution of their work and other personal bonds with regard to the above. The revisor should inform the editors on any conflict of interests that may influence the manuscript's analysis and should declare him/herself ineligible for this particular task.

10. The English text of articles accepted for publication will be submitted for correction by the following companies, below, and paid for by the authors:

11. It will not be accepted manuscripts in which:

a) Field experiments do not include data from two years or multiple locations within a year;

b) Data analysis of data obtained in a controlled environment is limited to only one experiment or bioassay without replication in time;

c) Experiments dealing only with testing the activity of chemical or biological products against biotic agents or physiological stresses;

d) In vitro culture experiments are limited to improving standard cultivation protocols or that fail in providing new information in the field;

e) Its scope is limited to report the first occurrence of a pest organism in the agroecosystem or the basic study of biological parameters of the organism without the clear indication of how the knowledge can improve local or regional pest management..

12. Formatation and other conventions are set below:

a) On submission the full name(s) of the author(s) (six at the most), her/his/their institutional address(es) and the e-mail of the author for correspondence should be inserted.

b) Articles should be subdivided into the following subtitles (in bold and unnumbered): Abstracts and Keywords in Portuguese and English; Introduction, Material and methods, Results and discussion, Conclusion, Acknowledgements (Optional) and References.

c) The title, up to twenty words, in Portuguese and English, must be to the point. A Running Title, up to six words, is also mandatory.

d) Abstracts in Portuguese and English, up to 200 words, shall contain brief information on the aims of the research, experimental material, methods employed, results and conclusion. Key words, up to six, in Portuguese and English, shall be added at the end of the abstracts and should not include words found in the title.

e) Papers should have between 12 and 20 pages, including figures, tables and bibliographical references, 1.5 line spacing, Times New Roman 12, numbered pages and lines, in MS-Word, or compatible.

f) Paper format should be A4 paper, with all page margins at 2.5 cm.

g) File containing the article to be transferred during submission should not exceed 2MB, and should have no identification label of the author, including in the option properties of Word.

h) Tables, Figures and Graphs shall be inserted within the text, immediately after being cited.

i) Figures and Tables not be longer than 17 cm wide.

j) Digitalized Figures should have a 300 dpi resolution and preferentially recorded in jpg or png. Colored illustrations will be accepted.

k) The International Measurement System is mandatory.

l) Equations should be edited using Word's Equation Built.

m) Variables should be identified after the equation.

n) Utilize regression analyze for quantitative factors.

o) Review of articles will be published when authors are invited by the Editorial Board or by the  Editor-in-chief of Eduem.

p) Eighty percent (80%) of the references should have been listed on the database ISI Web of Knowledge, Scopus or SciELO during the last 10 years. Preference to international citations of articles is recommended. Citations from theses, dissertations, monographs, proceedings, abstracts, expanded summaries, newspapers, magazines, technical bulletins and electronic documents will not be accepted.

q) Citations should follow examples below, based on the American Psychological Association (APA). Citation of text, insert surname and year: Lopes (2005) or (Lopes, 2005); for two authors: Souza and Scapim (2005) or (Souza & Scapim, 2005); for three or more authors, cite only the first followed by et al.: Venturieri et al. (2013) or (Venturieri et al., 2013)

REFERENCE MODELS

References should be organized in alphabetic order, with left alignment, following examples below, based on the American Psychological Association (APA). List all authors. Titles of journals should be written in their entire and in italics, without the place of publication. References must contain the DOI.

ARTICLES

One author

Oerke, E. C. (2006). Crop losses to pests. Journal of Agricultural Science, 144(1), 31-43. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021859605005708

Two to twenty authors

Caporusso, N. B., & Rolim, G. S. (2015). Reference evapotranspiration models using different time scales in the Jaboticabal region of São Paulo, Brazil. Acta Scientiarum. Agronomy, 37(1), 1-9. doi: 10.4025/actasciagron.v37i1.18277

Achten, W. M. J., Verchot, L., Franken, Y. J., Mathijs, E., Singh, V. P., Aerts, R., & Muys, B. (2008). Jatropha bio-diesel production and use. Biomass and Bioenergy, 32(12), 1063-1084.

Kalnay, E., Kanamitsu, M., Kistler, R., Collins, W., Deaven, D., Gandin, L., Iredell, M., Saha, S., White, G., Wollen, J., Zhu, Y., Chelliah, M., Ebisuzaki, W., Higgins, W., Janowiak, J., Mo, K. C., Ropelewski, C., Wang, J., Leetmaa, A., … Joseph, D. (1996). The NCEP/NCAR 40-Year Reanalysis Project. Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 77(3), 437-472. https://doi.org/10.1175/1520-0477(1996)077%3C0437:TNYRP%3E2.0.CO;2

BOOKS

Falconer, D. S., & Mackay, T. F. C. (1996). Introduction to quantitative genetics. Addison Wesley Longman.

Kevan, P. G., & Imperatriz-Fonseca, V. L. (2006). Pollinating bees: the conservation link between agriculture and nature (2nd ed.). Secretariat for Biodiversity and Forests.

Parra, J. R. P. (1991). Consumo e utilização de alimentos por insetos. In A. R. P. Panizzi (Ed.), Ecologia nutricional de insetos e suas implicações no manejo de pragas (p. 9-65). Manole. 

Artificial Intelligence

OpenAI. (2024). ChatGPT (Mar 14 version) [Large language model]. https://chat.openai.com/chat

We recommend reading this article for more information on how to cite this type of content:

McAdoo, T. (2024, February 23). How to cite ChatGPT. APA Style. https://apastyle.apa.org/blog/how-to-cite-chatgpt

Expect on average 16 weeks from submission to publication.