INSTRUCTIONS FOR MANUSCRIPT PREPARATION

Journal Ratarstvo i povrtarstvo publishes previously unpublished review articles, original research articles and preliminary reports from the following fields: genetic resources, genetics and breeding, biotechnology, microbiology, agro-chemistry, agro-ecology, plant physiology and biochemistry, seed production and processing, growing and cultivation practices, plant protection and agro-economics of field and vegetable crops and medicinal plants. Papers are published in English with abstracts in Serbian language.
The journal is issued three times a year and is available in open access. Articles published in the journal can be downloaded free of charge from the journal’s website and distributed for educational, non-commercial and commercial purposes. Articles are licensed under CC BY 3.0 RS.
There are no Submission Charges or Article Processing Charges (APC). The reviewers are assigned on a voluntary basis.

Manuscripts are submitted online via Aseestant.

Authors must follow the instructions for manuscript preparation. Failing to do so will result in manuscript rejection without review.

The manuscript should be prepared in Microsoft Word, font Times New Roman, font size 12 and single line spacing. It should not exceed 10 pages.

The manuscript should contain the title, summary in English and in Serbian, introduction, material and methods, results and discussion, conclusion, acknowledgements, and references.

Authors’ names are entered online during the submission process and are not listed in the manuscript itself, so as to facilitate the anonymity of the authors in the review process.

Authors’ affiliations are also entered online and the corresponding author is designated.

Summary should contain 250 words and should precisely and accurately reflect the content of the article, including short overview of the methods and the most important results. This is to ensure its successful indexing in the periodicals and databases. Summary is submitted in English and in Serbian. Editor will provide free translation of the summary into Serbian for the foreign authors.

Key words are automatically selected in a standardized way from the controlled international thesauri via the module Keywords Assignment Support System (KwASS), and authors approve the selection in later phases of the editing process. Automatic selection of key words facilitates journal’s quality control and better availability and searchability of the published articles. Key words are generated by a separate software  (AKwA: Automatic Keywords Assignment) which processes English titles and summaries of all submitted articles, extracts a list of key words from the selected thesaurus that describe the article best. AKwA key words are only a suggestion. The final key words are approved by the authors or editor during the copyediting process. The additional tool (KeFiR: Keywords Final Refinement) facilitates this decision making by providing the options to keep the suggested key words which describe the article best and discard the rest. At the same time, KeFiR enables the user to search the thesaurus so as to add more key words to the suggested AkWA list.

Manuscript text and language

The journal publishes articles in English. Both British and American variant are equally accepted and authors choose their preference. The preferred variant must be consistently used throughout one manuscript.

Italicize the names of species in Latin and foreign words and use standardized abbreviations and SI units.

Graphics include tables, figures, photographs, maps, images, diagrams, etc. Designate all graphics as either Table or Figure and number them in the order in which they appear. Place all graphics into their appropriate place within the manuscript and refer to them in the text.  If a table, figure, map, etc. is taken from another publication, cite the source publication and provide permission from the copyright holder(s) when submitting your manuscript. Table titles and figure captions should be concise and informative. Display and explain data in graphics in such a manner that they are clear and understandable separate from the text. Provide unit measures, legends, and bar scale on maps, and explain any abbreviations and special symbols.

Images must be high quality and in resolution at least 600 ppi in one of the following formats .jpg, .png, or .tif. Photographs must be high quality and in resolution at least 300 ppi in the format .jpg.

Acknowledgements should be provided separately after the text of the manuscript and before the reference list. Acknowledge the financing institution, code and title of the project (if the study was carried out within a specific project), and any institution or individual that facilitated the study or manuscript preparation, but not significantly enough to be listed as authors.

References are listed in the original language as published. For information purposes, an English translation of the title may be provided in brackets next to the original title. Titles and names written in a non-Latin script (e.g. Cyrillic, Russian, Chinese, Arabic) should be transcribed or transliterated into the English alphabet. The reference list should contain only works cited in the manuscript text.
Authors are obliged to enter the reference list online during the submission (non-numerated and separated with a blank line). Journal’s quality control of reference lists includes CiteMatcher and RefFormatter. CiteMatcher is a tool for automatic detection of omitted citations in the article and the reference list. RefFormatter is a tool for reference formatting in accordance with the chosen citation style and their original format listed in reliable normative databases. Authors are obliged to view, correct and approve all formatted references after manuscript is accepted for publication.

The chosen citation style of the journal is APA (American Psychological Association).

In-text citation

Give author name and year of publishing. Use ampersand (&) to separate two authors. Use et al. to substitute two or more authors.

Author (2006) analyzed …
Author & Author (1997) reported…
According to Author et al. (2010)…
Other studies (Author, 2006; Author et al., 2007; Author & Author 2008) suggested…

Journal articles

Give author name(s), year, article title (in sentence case), journal title (capitalize each word and italicize), journal volume (italicized), issue number (only if pagination starts from 1 in each issue of one volume), page numbers, DOI or URL (if available, do not put a full stop at the end because these are live links with a precise alphanumeric string).

Author, A. (date). Title of article. Journal Title, 11(2), 33-44. doi:xxxxxxxxx

Books

Give author name(s), year, book title (in sentence case and italicized), place and publisher.

Author, A. (date). Title of book. City: Publisher.

Book chapters

Give author name(s), year, chapter title (in sentence case), In, editor(s) name, Ed. or Eds. (in brackets), book title (italicized), chapter page numbers (in brackets), place and publisher.

 Author, A. (date). Title of chapter. In E. Editor (Ed.), Title of book (pp. xx–xx). City: Publisher.

Electronic books

Give author name(s), year, book title (in sentence case and italicized), format in square brackets (this is optional) and DOI or URL (instead of place and publisher).

Author, A. (date). Title of book. Retrieved from http://xxxxxxxxx
Author, A. (date). Title of book. doi:xxxxxxxxxxxx

For a chapter in an electronic book, add chapter title and pages if there are any.

Author, A. (date). Title of chapter. In E. Editor (Ed.), Title of book (pp. xx–xx). Retrieved from http://xxxxxxxxx
Author, A. (date). Title of chapter. In E. Editor (Ed.), Title of book (pp. xx–xx). doi:xxxxxxxxxx

Proceedings

Proceedings that are continually published are cited the same as journals.
Proceedings that are not continually published are cited the same as books.

Web pages

For a general discussion and mentioning of website in the text, it is sufficient to give URL in brackets without separate reference in the reference list. However, if you are referencing an individual document or information from a website, include a separate reference in the reference list.
Include format description in square brackets only if it is out of the ordinary, e.g. blog post, news article or lecture notes. Give precise and reliable URL which leads directly to the cited material. If the cited material is subject to periodical changes, give also the retrieval date.

Author, A. (date). Title of document
[Format description]. Retrieved from http://xxxxxxxxx