Submissions

Author Guidelines

*Maximum article file size limit is 2MB. 

*If unable to upload, please separate Figure and Table from the article and submit as a supplementary file.

 *Each supplementary file accepts only 2MB, you may upload multiple files in the supplementary file.

*Failure of file upload is due to file size is more than 2MB

 Manuscript prior to submission shall be in accordance with the instructions and format specified below:

• You are advised to download the document titled ‘Submission Template’ and use it as a template for your manuscript
• Advances in Agricultural and Food Research Journal accepts manuscripts written in Bahasa Malaysia (with additional Abstract in English) or either American or British English with clear and comprehensive English. Non-English words usage must be kept to a minimum and the font must be italicized (except for e.g. and i.e.).
• Authors from the country that English is not the first language are advised to go through professional language and content check prior to final submission. The author may also visit here for any relevant services.
• Authors are required to suggest 3-4 possible reviewers by filling up the Reviewer Suggestion Form at the end of the Submission Template.
• All articles that are submitted should attach a cover letter as a separate file.
• Authors shall provide all the information about the novelty and importance of your findings including the similarity index report by iThenticate/TurnitIn of 30% or less.

 Cover Letter

The contents of the cover letter should consist of a brief explanation of what was previously known, the conceptual advancement with the findings and its significance to a broad readership. Authors shall provide all the information about the novelty and importance of your findings including the similarity index report by iThenticate/TurnitIn of 30% or less. The cover letter also serves as evidence that the author approved the submission of the article to Advances in Agricultural and Food Research Journal and has not submitted this article elsewhere.

A well-written cover letter would provide an opportunity to convince journal editors to consider the article for publication. The author’s cover letters will only be read by the editors and will be kept strictly confidential. It will not be shared with the reviewers.

The cover letter also should include the completed declarations section. Please find below for the completed declarations section. Please choose one of the styles in each declaration section.

Conflict of interests:

• HF received a grant from YYY. HS is an employee of XXX and collaboration with YYY.
• The author(s) declare(s) that there is no conflict of interest

 Informed consent [OPTIONAL]:

• [Written]/[Verbal] informed consent was obtained from [all subjects]/[legally authorized representatives] prior to the study.
• Informed consent was not obtained for the present study because of –‘REASON’
• Not applicable

Ethical approval [OPTIONAL]: 

• Ethical approval for this study was obtained from – NAME OF ETHICS COMMITTEE OR INSTITUTIONAL REVIEW BOARD (APPROVAL NUMBER/ID)
• Ethical approval for this study was waived by – NAME OF ETHICS COMMITTEE OR INSTITUTIONAL REVIEW BOARD because ‘REASON FOR WAIVER’.
• Ethical approval was not obtained for the present study because of –‘REASON’.
• Not applicable

Trial registration [OPTIONAL]: 

• Name of the trial registry: Trial registration number
• This randomized clinical trial was not registered because –‘REASON’
• Not Applicable

Contributorship: 

BF and NP researched literature and conceived the study. MS was involved in protocol development, gaining ethical approval, patient recruitment and data analysis. BF wrote the first draft of the manuscript. All authors reviewed and edited the manuscript and approved the final version of the manuscript

Manuscript

Title

Authors should avoid the usage of excessive uncommon jargons that may not be understood by the target audience. Avoid titles that are too long and ensure that it is less than 50 words. Remember to spell out any acronyms first before using it throughout your article as this may help the readers who are not familiar with the meanings of the words. Also avoid irony, puns or humour in the title as it may not be understood by non-native speaking readers and it also tends to be more culture-specific, hence not being suitable for a broad audience.

List of Authors

Authors’ names should be spelled out fully instead of only listing their initials with their respective affiliations included in the footnotes. It must be ensured that the authors of a particular manuscript are listed based on the extent of their contribution and the major contributor should be listed first. Corresponding authors (maximum 2) must be identified with an asterisk. Affiliations should contain the following core information: department, institution, city, state, postal code, and country. Only include the email of one corresponding author for contact purposes in the manuscript. It is compulsory that all authors have viewed and approved the final version of the manuscript before submitting it via the system.

Abstract

Authors should include an abstract which is a concise summary of a research paper that is fully self-contained and makes sense by itself. It should be informative for the readers and include the research purpose and the results achieved that are significant. Please note that the abstract should be in the range of 200-250 words, indented and single-spaced. Ideally, an abstract should be the last thing that the author writes after completing his manuscript. Authors should also include 5-8 keywords after the abstract and avoid using the words that have already been used in the title of the manuscript.

Section Headings

Authors must ensure that all section headings, subheadings and sub-sub headings are differentiated by font size. The bold font must be used for the major headings and subheadings, and non-bold font must be used for the sub-sub headings in parenthesis.

Example:        

Headings: XXXXX
Subheadings: XXXXX
Sub-sub headings: xxxxx

Introduction

The introduction of the paper should start with an explanation of why particular research is being conducted and end with a statement/conclusion of the selected research approach. Authors must ensure that a non-technical reader is able to understand the introduction, including the technical goals and objectives, any technical issues faced and its application in the real world. It would be beneficial for the readers if the authors provided a clear, one sentence purpose statement of the research. It would be advisable to keep the length of the introduction about 1/2 page (1-2 paragraphs).

Materials and Methods

In this section, authors are required to provide a detailed account of the procedure that was followed while conducting the research described in the report. This will help the readers to obtain a clear understanding of the research and also allow them to replicate the study in the future. Authors should ensure that every method used is described and include citations for the procedures that have been described previously. Avoid any kind of discussion in this section regarding the methods or results of any kind.

Ethics

Ethics information, including IACUC permit numbers and/or IRB name, if applicable. This information should be included in a subheading labelled "Ethics Statement" in the "Methods" section of your manuscript file, in as much detail as possible.

Results

This section can be divided into subheadings. This section focuses on the results of the experiments performed.

Discussion

In this section, authors should state their interpretations and explain the implications of their results and make suggestions for future research. The discussion should be kept as short as possible while clearly and fully stating, supporting, explaining, and defending the author’s answers and discussing other important and directly relevant issues. Authors should avoid discussing side issues as it may obscure the message.

Conclusion

Authors should note that the conclusion is extremely important as it provides closure for their paper. An effective conclusion would leave the reader feeling satisfied that the concepts have been fully explained. The conclusion should start with a clear statement of principal findings that also has to be concise. It would help to set the paper in the context of previous work as this will show the readers how significant or worthy your research is. Please restrain from rewriting the abstract and recommendations for further research can be included in this section.

Funding

It is the authors’ responsibility to declare all financial and non-financial support that may be considered as a source of competing interest in relation to their submitted manuscript in this section. Any grants, royalties, consulting fees are considered as financial supports and must be declared. Other forms of non-financial support that must also be declared are externally-supplied equipment/biological sources, writing assistance, administrative support, contributions from non-authors etc.

Appendix

Any technical details that are necessary to include, but that interrupts the flow of the article, can be attached in the appendix section. Any appendices should be included at the end of the main text of the paper, after the acknowledgements section (if any) but before the reference list. For supplementary figures, authors are advised to include it in the ‘Supplementary figures’ section.

Text

The text of the manuscript should be in Microsoft Word or Latex. The length of the manuscript cannot be more than 50000 characters (inclusive of spaces) or approximately 7000 words.

Figures

Authors should include all figures into the manuscript and submit it as 1 file in the OJS system. Reference to the “” is strongly encouraged. Figures include photographs, scanned images, graphs, charts and schematic diagrams. Figures submitted should avoid unnecessary decorative effects (e.g. 3D graphs) as well as be minimally processed (e.g. changes in brightness and contrast applied uniformly for the entire figure). It should also be set against a white background.

Please remember to label all figures (e.g. axis etc.) and add in captions (below the figure) as required. These captions should be numbered (e.g. Figure 1, Figure 2, etc.) in boldface. All figures must have a brief title (also known as caption) that describes the entire figure without citing specific panels, followed by a legend defined as a description of each panel. Please identify each panel with uppercase letters in parenthesis (e.g. A, B, C, etc.)

The preferred file formats for any separately submitted figure(s) are TIFF or JPEG. All figures should be legible in print form and of optimal resolution. Optimal resolutions preferred are 300 dots per inch for RGB coloured, 600 dots per inch for grey-scale and 1200 dots per inch for line art. Although there are no file size limitation imposed, authors are highly encouraged to compress their figures to an ideal size without unduly affecting legibility and resolution of figures. This will also speed up the process of uploading in the submission system if necessary.

The Editor-in-Chief and Publisher reserve the right to request from author(s) the high-resolution files and unprocessed data and metadata files should the need arise at any point after manuscript submission for reasons such as production, evaluation or other purposes. The file name should allow for ease in identifying the associated manuscript submitted.

Tables, lists and equations

Tables, lists and equations must be submitted together with the manuscript. Likewise, lists and equations should be properly aligned and its meaning clear to readers. Tables created using Microsoft Word table function are preferred. Place each table in your manuscript file right after the paragraph in which it is first cited.

Do not submit your tables in separate files. The tables should include a concise but sufficiently explanatory title at the top. Vertical lines should not be used to separate columns. Leave some extra space between the columns instead. All tables should be based on three horizontal lines to separate the caption, header and body. A few additional horizontal lines MAY be included as needed (example below). Any explanations essential to the understanding of the table should be given in footnotes at the bottom of the table. SI units should be used.

Supplementary information

This section is optional and contains all materials and figures that have been excluded from the entire manuscript. This information is relevant to the manuscript but remains non-essential to readers’ understanding of the manuscript’s main content. All supplementary information should be submitted as a separate file in Step 4 during submission. Please ensure the names of such files contain ‘suppl. info’.

In-text citation

Reference citations in the text should be clearly stated in brackets. For citing a work by one or two author/s: Name the author/s in the signal phrase or in brackets each time you cite the work. Use the word “and” between the authors' names within the text and use the ampersand (&) in brackets. For citing a work by three or more authors: Use the first author's name followed by et al. in the signal phrase or in brackets. Some examples:

1. Chen and Tao (2001) used wavelet transform for online inspection of deboned poultry.
2. Pyramidal decomposition was successfully applied to extract the features for face recognition (Chen & Zhang 2007).
3. Semler et al. (2005) investigated the discriminating power of wavelet textural features extracted from computed tomography (CT) scans for classification of tissues.
4. X-ray imaging has been used for detection of insects in grain (Karunakaran et al., 2004) and sprout damaged wheat kernels (Neethirajan et al., 2007).

Personal communications and unpublished works can only be used in the main text of the submission and are not to be placed in the Reference section. Authors are advised to limit such usage to the minimum. They should also be easily identifiable by stating the authors and year of such unpublished works or personal communications and the word ‘Unpublished’ in parenthesis. E.g. (Smith J, 2000, Unpublished)

References

The references section is compulsory and should be placed at the end of all manuscripts. The list of references should only include works that are cited in the text and that have been published or accepted for publication. Personal communications and unpublished works should be excluded from this section.

The journal follows the APA style of references. For references in the reference list, if the referred article has two or three authors, the last author name is preceded by ampersand (&). If the referred article has more than three authors, list only the first three authors and abbreviate the remaining authors to italicized ‘et al.’ (meaning: “and others”). Authors referenced are listed with their surname followed by their initials (e.g. Smith J). All references should be sequenced according to alphabet. References should follow the following pattern:

Journal article in print/online

a. Author 1, Author 2, Author 3, et al. (Year). Title of article. Title of Journal, Vol(issue), page number(s).

b. Include the digital object identifier, DOI (if applicable)

Example 1: Younger, P. & Older, P. (2004). Classification of cereal grains using wavelet, morphological, colour, and textural features of non-touching kernel images. Biosystems Engineering, 99(3), 330–337.

Example 2: Terauchi, Y., Takamoto, I., Kubota, N., et al. (2007). Discrimination of varieties of tea using near-infrared spectroscopy by principal component analysis and BP model. Journal of Food Engineering, 79(4), 1238–1242. doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jfoodeng.2006.04.042

Book

a. Author 1, Author 2, Author 3, et al. (Year). Title: subtitle of book (Edition [if not first edition]). Place of publication: Publisher.

Example: Miles D. A., Van Dis M. L., Williamson G. F., et al. (2009). Sustainable Food and Agriculture (1st ed.). St. Louis: Saunders Elsevier.