ISSN 0871-018X
[printed version]

ISSN 2183-041X
[digital version]

INSTRUCTIONS TO AUTHORS

• Scope and policy
• Form and preparation of manuscripts

• The Revista de Ciências Agrárias publishes scientific or technical articles and bibliographic reviews in the context of Agrarian Sciences and related.

• It welcomes original papers from members and non-members of the Sociedade de Ciências Agrárias de Portugal (SCAP);

• Once received, manuscripts will be scrutinised by the Editor-in-Chief. In case the manuscript is selected for evaluation, the Editor-in-Chief send it to the Associated Editor pertaining to the correspondent scientific area. In case the manuscript is found relevant for evaluation, the Associated Editor will select two specialised reviewers and ask them to review the manuscript. The Associated Editor will issue a recommendation (either for acceptance, rejection or requiring corrections) taking the reviewer comments into consideration along with its own opinion on the manuscript;

• Authors must ensure that manuscripts submitted for publication will not be presented to another journal;

• The doctrine of the articles is the sole responsibility of the author(s);

• All edit rights belong to the Sociedade de Ciências Agrárias de Portugal;

• The authors must observe the rules laid down on the presentation of the text;

• In the context of manuscript evaluation, Revista de Ciências Agrárias will seek to ensure that the manuscripts do not suffer from any form of plagiarism, duplication or other anti-ethical conducts.

• Published articles are freely available on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself.

The text should be structured, whenever possible, as follows:

The manuscripts must be written clearly and succinctly, in Portuguese, English or Spanish. The words used in different language of the text must be inserted in italics. Standard SI units should be used.

Manuscripts must not exceed 20 A4 pages, should be typed in Times New Roman , size 12, justified, and lines should be numbered consecutively throughout the entire document. Double-space everything, including pages with tables, figures legends, footnotes and literature citations. Top and bottom margins must be of 2.5 cm and left and right 3 cm. Do not indent subheadings or sub-subheadings or paragraphs.

Title - Size 14, bold, justified left, followed by its translation into English (or Portuguese if English is the main language), size 12, bold, one line spacing between titles. Include a short title of 50 characters at most, in case the title exceeds this limit.

Author(s) - Provide the name of each author, with only the first name and the surname written out in full, size 12, left aligned, each author separated by commas, the latter being preceded by the word “and”. Spacing between titles and authors should be two lines. Give the complete institutional affiliation for each author including the name of the institution (e.g. Department/Centre, Faculty and University), city and country. The corresponding author should be denoted with an asterisk (*). If the is more than one institution, these should be numbered sequentially and the respective authors' surname(s) followed by the corresponding number in superscript format. After the affiliations, a line should be included with the E-mail address of the corresponding author according to the following example “(*E-mail: abc@def.gh)”. The affiliations and the E-mail address should be size 10, italic, left aligned, with one line spacing.

Articles should be divided, wherever possible, into sections in the following order: Abstract, Keywords, Resumo, Palavras-chave, Introduction, Materials and Methods, Results, Discussion (or Results and Discussion combined) , Conclusions, Acknowledgements (optional) and References . Section titles should be formatted in bold. Sub-section titles should be italic not-bold, while sub-subsection titles should be underlined not-bold not-italic.

Example:

Materials and Methods

Plant material

Field collection

Abstract and Resumo - must not exceed 200 words each;

Keywords and Palavras-chave –no more than five, separated by commas. One line spacing from the abstract.

Tables and Figures - Font Times New Roman , should be sequentially numbered, in Arabic numbers (e.g.: Table 1 – Production of seeds). Tables and figures should be submitted on a separate file. The desired location of its insertion in the text should be signalled. Tables should be no more than 120 character spaces wide. All text within each table should be in lower-case letters except the first word of a phrase or sentence. Experimental data may be presented in graphic or tabular form, but not both. Data points and relevant equations must be included on figures. Legends should be typed above the tables and beneath the figures. Figures must be 300 d.p.i. or more.

Supplemental material – Relevant information that cannot be included in the body of the manuscript due to its nature or extension may be submitted (and published) as supplemental material, which should be a single pdf file, with a maximum of 5 Mb.

References - should be cited in the text as follows – Martinez (1999) or (Martinez, 1999) and Radish and Baptist (2005). When there are more than two authors, only the first author should be cited, followed by “ et al. ”. References must be listed alphabetically, based on the surname of the first author, and chronologically for the same author(s), in which case the citation in the body text should be added of a letter (a,b,c…) enabling an unequivocal correspondence with the reference (e.g., Martinez, 1999a). Whenever available, the DOI of any reference should be given. In the following examples, please take note of the system of punctuation:

Article in a journal :

Monteiro, F.; Marques, P. & Madeira, M. (2015) - São os Podzóis dominantes nas formações arenosas do litoral português? O caso da Mata Nacional de Leiria. Revista de Ciências Agrárias , vol. 38, n. 4, p. 455-472. http://dx.doi.org/10.19084/RCA15135

Book:

Martinez, H.E.P. (1999) – O uso do cultivo hidropônico de plantas em pesquisa . 2ª ed. Viçosa, Imprensa Universitária, 47 p.

Book chapter:

Bierhuizen, J.F. (1973) - The effect of temperature on plant growth, development and yield. In: Slatyer, R.O. (Ed.) – Plant responses to climatic factors . Paris, Unesco, p. 89-98.

Thesis:

Ker, J.C. (1995) - Mineralogia, sorção e dessorção de fosfato, magnetização e elementos traços em latossolos do Brasil . Tese de Doutoramento. Viçosa, Universidade Federal de Viçosa. 181 p.

Published paper from a conference or a congress:

Bickerstaffe, R.; Couter, E.C. & Morton, J.D. (1997) - Consistency tenderness of retail meat in New Zealand. In: Proceedings of the 43rd International Congress of Meat Science and Technology . Auckland, New Zealand, ICOMST, p. 196-197.

Electronic documents:

Radish, M.C. & Baptist F.O. (2005) - Floresta e sociedade: um percurso (1875-2005). Silva Lusitana , vol. 13, n. 2, p. 143-157. [cit. 2006-06-14]. <http://www.scielo.oces.mctes.pt/pdf/slu/v13n2/v13n2a01.pdf>.

The journal also accepts Short communications , which are devoted to publish relevant works that, due to their nature, are shorter than full articles. These should not be longer than 2000 word in total (i.e., from the titles to the end of references, incluinding the legends of Tables and Figures), with a maximum of one table, one figure, and 10 references. The Abstract and the Resumo should not exceed 100 words. The main text should not be structured in sections, except for Abstract, Key-words, Resumo and Palavras-chave, as well as Acknowledgments and References. For the remaining, the rules for full manuscripts should be followed.

Submission - The manuscript should be submitted in a Microsoft Word file. Tables and figures should be in a separate file. The authors should use https://revistas.rcaap.pt/index.php/rca/ where, after registration (authors must activate the ‘author’ option), they will be able to submit the manuscript and follow the evaluation process. Any questions or doubts should be addressed to revista@scap.pt.

Colour illustrations will be reproduced in the online publication at no additional cost to the author. In the printed publication, however, illustrations will be printed on black and white, unless the author wants to bear the full cost (50€ per colour page) involved in colour reproduction.

Publication costs -For non-members of SCAP, each accepted article publishing has a cost of 150€ (hundred and fifty Euros). To be considered for the publishing fee waiver, at least one of the authors must be a SCAP member prior to submitting the manuscript. The article will only be published after the payment of that amount, being all transfer fees incurred by the author(s). There is no submission fee.