Guidelines for Authors





Authors are kindly invited to suggest potential reviewers (names, affiliations and email addresses) for their manuscript, if they wish.

Manuscript preparation

Original Articles: should normally be divided into an abstract, introduction, materials and methods, results, discussion and references. The abstract should contain a maximum of 400 words. A maximum of 20 authors is permitted, and additional authors should be listed in an ad hoc appendix.
Short Communications: are articles with a simple layout and containing limited data (no more than two figures or tables) and a small number of citations (not more than 25). They should be limited to 2,000 words of text (figure captions, table headings and references lists are additional to this limit).
Letters to the editor: should be from 250 to 1,000 words in length. Authors of letters to the editor should provide a short title for their letter.

IMPORTANT! Checklist for Authors submitting manuscript to the Italian Journal of Agronomy

Editors will NOT send to reviewers most articles that will not be compliant to the following suggestions:

  1. Title:
    1. try to avoid titles like e.g. "Effects of nitrification inhibitors on nitrate leaching in maize" or including the name of the specific geographic area where the research was done.
    2. Titles should reveal clearly what are the main findings of the study e.g. in the form of a strong statement like e.g. "Nitrification inhibitors are not effective in preventing nitrate leaching in maize cropping systems".
    3. Relevant keywords ideally should appear within the first 65 characters of the title: this will improve the search engine discoverability.
    4. keep your title as short as possible, moving details to the first or second sentence of the abstract.
  2. Highlights: please add up to 5 bullet points summarizing the main outcomes of the article in the form of statements possibly avoiding any non-standard abbreviation.
  3. Key words:
    1. choose your key words carefully so that they are easily recognized worldwide in the scientific domain. e.g. grassland is better than pasture; alfalfa is better than Lucerne. Check with search engines (e.g. Scholar) the occurrence of synonyms and prefer the word with higher occurrence.
    2. use common keywords, usually 1 word per keyword, rarely more than 2 words.
    3. double check that the keywords used in the title and in the keyword sections are also repeated (consistent) in the manuscript text.
  4. Abstract:
    1. place essential findings and keywords in the first two sentences of your abstract.
    2. repeat your relevant keywords 3-6 times in the abstract text to improve search engine discoverability.
  5. Introduction:
    1. please check that the introduction text clearly frames the main research questions of the proposed study into a wide international scientific debate, with updated references, mostly of the previous 5 years.
    2. for the experimental studies, include the hypothesis/es and objectives in the final part of the introduction.
  6. Results:
    1. double check the consistency of results in tables and figures.
    2. use the international system of units (SI).
    3. check that number approximation is adequate in relation to the magnitude; do not use more digits that are allowed by the accuracy of your measurements, even for derived statistics and computations.
    4. always provide some measure of variability for all experimental results, e.g. standard errors, coefficients of variation, least significant differences.
  7. Discussion:
    1. normally the discussion section is separated by the results section but this may not be a strict rule.
    2. please double check full consistency with hypotheses made in the introduction in the discussion structure.
    3. frame your results in the international scientific debate by possibly referring to most updated scientific literature.
    4. do not repeat results in the discussion section: just discuss them!
  8. Conclusions:
    1. provide clear answers to the research questions made by the study, possibly point by point.
    2. normally the conclusion section does NOT contain references.
    3. express clearly the boundaries and limitations of the study in relation to methodology used.
  9. References: double check that all citations are in the references and vice versa.


The manuscripts should be double spaced with numbered lines and wide margins and should be arranged as follows.
Main text: should be structured as explained in the checklist above.
Tables: tables are numbered consecutively in Arabic numbers without “no.” before the number. References should be made in the text to each table. The desired style of presentation can be found in published articles. Titles of tables should be descriptive enough to be able to stand alone. Do not present the same data in tabular and graphic form.


  1. Color (saved as CMYK): minimum 300 dpi.
  2. Black and white/grays: minimum 600 dpi
  3. Lettering of figures must be clearly labelled.


References should be prepared strictly according to the instructions given below
The Journal follows the "author, year" style of citation. When a citation has one or two authors, cite the reference throughout using the name(s) and the date. When a citation has more than two authors, cite the reference throughout the text with et al. following the last name of the first author. When two or more references are included in a grouping within a sentence, they are arranged and separated by a semicolon. The first criterion is the year (former citations precede recent ones); multiple citations for a given year are further arranged alphabetically and multiple citations for the same initial letter are arranged as follows: first the citation with one author, secondly the citation with two authors, then the other (with et al.). When the same author has two references with different dates, cite them in chronological order, separating the dates with a comma; when the same author has two references with the same date, arrange the dates as a and b (also in the reference list) and separated by a comma. Journal titles mentioned in the reference list should be abbreviated according to the following websites (sequenced by relevance):

  1. ISI Journal Abbreviations Index (
  2. Biological Journals and Abbreviations (
  • Example: (Foury, 1967, 1972; Burns et al., 1970; Allen et al., 1990; White et al., 1990a, 1990b; Basnizki and Zohary, 1994).

Citation should be made in the text to each reference. Citations are listed in strict alphabetical order by first author' last names. Use capital and lower case letters for authors' names. If all authors are identical for two or more citations, chronological order of publication should dictate the order of citations. When more than one paper in a given year is listed by authors whose names are in the same order in each paper, the papers are arranged in alphabetical order of the paper title. Use the following system to arrange your references:

  2. books: National Research Council, 2001. Nutrient Requirements of Dairy Cattle. 7th rev. ed. National Academy Press, Washington, DC, USA.
  4. proceedings: Rossi A, Bianchi B, 1998. How writing the references. Proc. 4th World Congr. Appl. Livest. Prod., Armidale, Australia, 26:44-6. (Or 44, if one page) - Blanco P, Nigro B, 1970. Not numbered volumes. Page 127 (or pp 12-18) in Proc. 3rd Int. Conf. Cattle Dis., Philadelphia, PA, USA.
  5. thesis: Rossi P, 1999. Stima di parametri genetici nella razza Reggiana. Degree Diss., Università di Milano, Italy.
  6. material from a World Wide Web site: Food and Drug Administration, 2001. Available from:
  7. in press: Manuscripts that have been accepted for publication but are not yet published can be listed in the literature cited with the designation (In press) following the journal title.
  8. other: Citations such as personal communication, unpublished data, etc. should be incorporated in the text and NOT placed into the Reference section.

Peer-review policy

All manuscripts submitted to our journal are critically assessed by external and/or in-house experts in accordance with the principles of peer review, which is fundamental to the scientific publication process and the dissemination of sound science. Each paper is first assigned by the Editors to an appropriate Associate Editor who has knowledge of the field discussed in the manuscript. The first step of manuscript selection takes place entirely in-house and has two major objectives: i) to establish the article appropriateness for our journals readership; ii) to define the manuscript priority ranking relative to other manuscripts under consideration, since the number of papers that the journal receives is much greater than it can publish. If a manuscript does not receive a sufficiently high priority score to warrant publication, the editors will proceed to a quick rejection. The remaining articles are reviewed by at least two different external referees (second step or classical peer review). Manuscripts should be prepared according to the Uniform Requirements established by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE).


Changes in Authorship
If authors request removal or addition of an author after manuscript submission or during the peer-review process or at article acceptance, the journal editors should receive a letter clearly explaining the reason for the change.  Authors are also requested to sign and send to the Editors a statement of agreement for the requested change from all listed authors and from the author to be removed or added. No changes to the Authors or Corresponding Author can be made after publication of the article, either as an “Advance Online Article” or in the regular issue. Instead, a corrigendum may be considered by the journal editor.

Obligation to Register Clinical Trials

Protection of Human Subjects and Animals in Research