Guide to Authors

The Journal accepts original research articles, reviews and short communications on all aspects of horticultural crops (fruits, vegetables, condiments, spices, flowers, ornamentals, turf grasses, medicinal plants, beverage plants, plantation crops, mushrooms etc.). For further detail, please see section “Aim and Scope” of the Journal. To prepare the manuscript, author should strictly follow the Journal guidelines.

Manuscript Layout

The manuscript should be prepared by using A-4 size (210 × 297 mm) paper, with line spacing double and font Times New Roman size 12. The margins on all sides (top, bottom, left and right) should be left 2.5 cm. All the abbreviations should be defined at first mention and the used consistently. Tables and Figures should be given at the end after References. All the pages should be numbered consecutively.

Title

The title of the manuscript should be concise and self-explanatory.

Authors and affiliations

Full names of authors along with affiliation (including country name), email and ORCiD (optional) must be mentioned. The corresponding author may be indicated by a * and his/her E-mail address, telephone number should also be given.

Keywords

Four to seven the most relevant key words should be given, not appearing in the title of the manuscript.

Short running title

Authors should provide a short running title of their manuscripts

Abstract

The abstract should contain brief introduction of problem and methodology, followed by the significant results and one or two concluding sentence(s). It should not exceed 250 words.

Introduction

Introduction should be comprehensive indicating background of the study, the most recent and relevant review on the topic and hypothesis or indicating objectives of the study.

Materials and Methods

The section should contain essential details of materials used and methodology adopted, including experimental design and statistical analysis. The units must be abbreviated according to the International System of Units (SI units).  Equations or formulae should be written by using the equation editor or MathType.

Results

The results should be written in past tense. The section should include findings of the research only without any discussion. The results should be presented either in table form or in figures, not the same data in both forms to avoid any duplication of results. However, plates or photographs, dendrograms, phylogenetic trees, line drawings can also be given as figures.

Discussion

The results obtained should be discussed in a logical way in the light of most recent literature.

Conclusion

This section should contain a short conclusion text, only highlight significant findings of the study in 2-4 sentences.

Declaration of Competing Interests

All authors must disclose any financial and personal relationships with other people or organizations that could inappropriately influence (bias) their work. Examples of potential conflicts of interest include employment, consultancies, stock ownership, honoraria, paid expert testimony, patent applications/registrations, and grants or other funding. Authors should provide a declaration of competing interest statement before acknowledgement section of the manuscript. This statement will be published within the article if accepted.

Author Contribution Statement

CRediT (Contributor Roles Taxonomy) was introduced with the intention of recognizing individual author contributions, reducing authorship disputes and facilitating collaboration. The idea came about following a 2012 collaborative workshop led by Harvard University and the Wellcome Trust, with input from researchers, the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) and publishers, including Elsevier, represented by Cell Press.

CRediT offers authors the opportunity to share an accurate and detailed description of their diverse contributions to the published work.

  • The corresponding author is responsible for ensuring that the descriptions are accurate and agreed by all authors.
  • The role(s) of all authors should be listed, using the relevant above categories.
  • Authors may have contributed in multiple roles.
  • CRediT in no way changes the journal’s criteria to qualify for authorship.

CRediT statements should be provided during the submission process and will appear above the acknowledgement section of the published paper as shown further below.

Conceptualization: Ideas; formulation or evolution of overarching research goals and aims.

Methodology: Development or design of methodology; creation of models.

Software: Programming, software development; designing computer programs; implementation of the computer code and supporting algorithms; testing of existing code components.

Validation: Verification, whether as a part of the activity or separate, of the overall replication/reproducibility of results/experiments and other research outputs.

Formal analysis: Application of statistical, mathematical, computational, or other formal techniques to analyze or synthesize study data.

Investigation: Conducting a research and investigation process, specifically performing the experiments, or data/evidence collection.

Resources: Provision of study materials, reagents, materials, patients, laboratory samples, animals, instrumentation, computing resources, or other analysis tools.

Data curation: Management activities to annotate (produce metadata), scrub data and maintain research data (including software code, where it is necessary for interpreting the data itself) for initial use and later reuse.

Writing – Original Draft: Preparation, creation and/or presentation of the published work, specifically writing the initial draft (including substantive translation).

Writing – Review & Editing: Preparation, creation and/or presentation of the published work by those from the original research group, specifically critical review, commentary or revision – including pre-or post-publication stages.

Visualization: Preparation, creation and/or presentation of the published work, specifically visualization/ data presentation.

Supervision: Oversight and leadership responsibility for the research activity planning and execution, including mentorship external to the core team.

Project administration: Management and coordination responsibility for the research activity planning and execution.

Funding acquisition: Acquisition of the financial support for the project leading to this publication.

* Reproduced from Brand et al. (2015), Learned Publishing 28(2), with permission of the authors.

Sample CRediT author statement

Raheel Anwar: Conceptualization, Methodology, Software. Wang Li: Data curation, Writing- Original draft preparation. Ortha John: Visualization, Investigation. Bao Zhao: Supervision. Aday Kumar: Software, Validation. Sun Qi: Writing- Reviewing and Editing.

Acknowledgements

Acknowledgments should include grants, funds and people who helped in conducting research or in preparation the manuscript, etc. The names of sponsors/funding organizations should be written in full.

References

The references in the text can be cited as Anjum (2011), Amjad and Anjum (2007), Anjum et al. (2015) etc. or in other format like (Anjum, 2011), (Amjad and Anjum, 2007), (Anjum et al., 2015). In the References section, the references along with its DOI can be cited as:

Journal

Anjum, M.A. 2011. Effect of exogenously–applied spermidine on growth and physiology of citrus rootstock Troyer citrange under saline conditions. Turkish Journal of Agriculture and Forestry, 35(1): 43-53. https://www.doi.org/10.3906/tar-0912-563

Amjad, M. and Anjum, M.A. 2007. Effect of post-irradiation ageing on onion seeds.  Acta Physiologiae Plantarum, 29(1):63-69. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11738-006-0010-5

Anjum, M.A., Qasim, S.A., Ahmad, S. and Hussain, S. 2015. Assessment of advantages of pea and non-legume winter vegetable intercropping systems through competition and economic indices. Experimental Agriculture, 51(3): 327-343. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0014479714000337

Conference / Seminar / Symposium etc.

Ziaf, K., Amjad, M., Pervez, M.A., Anjum, M.A., Iqbal, Q., Rasheed, S. and Saeed, T. 2007. Seed priming for improved seedling vigour in chillies. Proceedings of the International Symposium on Prospects of Horticultural Industry in Pakistan, March 28-30, 2007, Institute of Horticultural Science, University of Agriculture, Faisalabad, Pakistan, pp. 251-256.

Book

Hartmann, H.T., Kester, D.E., Davies, E.T. and Geneve, R.L. 2009. Plant Propagation: Principles and Practices (7th Ed.). Prentice-Hall India Learning Pvt. Ltd., New Delhi, India, pp. 201-207.

Edited Book

Ziaf, K., Amjad, M. and Anjum, M.A. 2017. Production and handling of vegetable and flower seeds. In: Khan, A.S. and Ziaf, K. (eds.). Horticulture: Science and Technology. University of Agriculture, Faisalabad, Pakistan, pp. 103-132.

Thesis/Research Report

Ahmad, R. 2016. Characterization of indigenous Zizyphus (Jujube) germplasm through inter simple sequence repeat (SSR) markers. M.Sc. (Hons.) thesis, Department of Horticulture, Bahauddin Zakariya University, Multan, Pakistan.

Tables

All the tables must be mentioned in the text in consecutive numerical order. Tables should be numbered with Arabic numerals. Title of the table should be brief but comprehensive. However, complete name for abbreviations (in any), details about treatments (if necessary), number of observations, probability and test of significance used etc. and citation of a reference can be given as footnote. Each table should be presented on a separate page.

Figures

All the figures should be numbered using Arabic numerals and must be cited in text in consecutive numerical order. If there are some parts of the figures, these should be denoted by lowercase letters (a, b, c, etc.). Each figure should be presented on a separate page.

Submission of Manuscripts

Please click here to see menuscript submission instructions.

Policy on Ethics

The authors are advised to submit plagiarism report with their manuscript. The manuscripts with plagiarized material 20% or more will be rejected without any review. For further detail, please review Journal’s ‘Policies and procedures for handling allegations of author misconduct, scientific misconduct or other ethical violations‘.

Review Process

All contributions will be initially assessed by the Chief Editor for suitability for the journal. Papers deemed suitable are then typically sent to a minimum of two independent expert reviewers to assess the scientific quality of the paper. The fate of the manuscript depends upon the referees’ comments and their recommendations. The Chief Editor is responsible for the final decision regarding acceptance or rejection of articles. The Chief Editor’s decision is final. Editors are not involved in decisions about papers which they have written themselves or have been written by family members or colleagues or which relate to products or services in which the editor has an interest. Any such submission is subject to all of the journal’s usual procedures, with peer review handled independently of the relevant editor and his/her research group.

Copyrights

In order for “Pakistan Society for Horticultural Science” to publish and disseminate research articles, we need certain publishing rights from authors, which are determined by a publishing agreement between the author and “Pakistan Society for Horticultural Science”.

Since “Journal of Horticultural Science & Technology” is an Open Access journal, the authors license exclusive rights in their article to “Pakistan Society for Horticultural Science”.

Under our publishing agreement, we support authors in their need to share, disseminate and maximize the impact of their research.

Authors will also have additional rights, depending on the Creative Commons end user license that they select. This Creative Commons license sets out the rights that readers (as well as the authors) have to re-use and share the article. Please see Creative Commons Licensing Policies for more information on how articles can be re-used and shared under these licenses.

Irrespective of how an article is published, “Pakistan Society for Horticultural Science” is committed to protect and defend authors’ works and their reputation. We take allegations of infringement, plagiarism, ethical disputes, and fraud very seriously.

Author Rights

This section explains the rights that authors have when they publish with “Pakistan Society for Horticultural Science”. These apply to the corresponding author and all co-authors of the manuscripts published in “Journal of Horticultural Science & Technology”.

  • Retain patent and trademark rights.
  • Retain the rights to use their research data freely without any restriction.
  • Receive proper attribution and credit for their published work.
  • Re-use their own material in new works without permission or payment (with full acknowledgement of the original article):
  1. Extend an article to book length.
  2. Include an article in a subsequent compilation of their own work.
  3. Re-use portions, excerpts, and their own figures or tables in other works.
  • Use and share their works for scholarly purposes (with full acknowledgement of the original article):
    1. In their own classroom teaching. Electronic and physical distribution of copies is permitted.
    2. If an author is speaking at a conference, they can present the article and distribute copies to the attendees.
    3. Distribute the article, including by email, to their students and to research colleagues who they know for their personal use.
    4. Include in a thesis or dissertation (provided this is not published commercially)
      Share copies of their article privately as part of an invitation-only work group on commercial sites with which the publisher has a hosting agreement.
  • Publicly share the preprint on any website or repository at any time.
  • Publicly share the accepted manuscript on non-commercial sites.
  • Publicly share the final published article (in line with the author’s choice of end user license).
  • Retain copyright.

Institution Rights

Authors’ institutions have the right to use articles for classroom teaching and internal training. Articles can be used for these purposes throughout the author’s institution, not just by the author (providing full acknowledgement of the original article is given).

  • Copies can be distributed electronically as well as in physical form for classroom teaching and internal training purposes.
  • Material can be included in coursework and courseware programs for use within the institution (but not in Massive Open Online Courses).
  • Articles can be included in applications for grant funding.
  • Theses and dissertations which contain embedded final published articles as part of the formal submission can be posted publicly by the awarding institution with DOI links back to the formal publication.

Government Rights

For US government employees, works created within the scope of their employment are considered to be public domain and Pakistan Society for Horticultural Science’s publishing agreements do not require a transfer or license of rights for such works.

In the UK and certain commonwealth countries, a work created by a government employee is copyrightable, but the government may own the copyright (Crown copyright).

Revenue Sources

“Journal of Horticultural Science & Technology” is an official quarterly publication of the “Pakistan Society for Horticultural Science” which is a non-profit organization. Publication fee is the only revenue of the “Journal of Horticulture Science & Technology” which covers expense incurred on printing issues (free distribution to libraries, and academic and research institutes) and their online publication at https://www.pshsciences.org/publications/jhst/.

Publication Fee

After acceptance of a manuscript, corresponding author has to pay the following publication charges.

  1. Corresponding author affiliated with institute inside Pakistan = PKR 2,000/-
  2. Corresponding authors affiliated with institute outside Pakistan = FREE

If national corresponding author of a manuscript is Life or Regular member of the Pakistan Society for Horticultural Science, he/she is entitled to claim 50% rebate in publication charges for each accepted paper.

To deposit publication fee, click here to see bank details. Email the original bank receipt to “Managing Editor JHST” at “raheelanwar@uaf.edu.pk” along with detail of submitted article (manuscript number, title and list of authors).