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Author Guidelines

All the authors who submit manuscripts to Tropical Agricultural Research and Extension are strongly requested to follow the instructions of the authours. Manuscripts that are not prepared according to the instructions given by the journal will be rejected without further processing. tare@agricc.ruh.ac.lk

Publication charges
The journal of Tropical Agricultural Research and Extension does not levy article submission charges or article processing charges from authors.

Peer review process
TARE journal uses a double-blind peer-review process. Therefore, manuscripts submitted to the TARE journal are reviewed by at least two experts in the same or related field after the preliminary screening by the Editorial Board of the journal on the suitability of the manuscript. The two reviewers are assigned by the Editor in Chief in consultation with the Editorial Board. Based on the evaluation report of the reviewers, the editorial board then make a final decision for acceptance or rejection of the manuscript. If there are discrepancies between the comments of the two reviewers, the manuscript will be sent to a third reviewer before making the final decision. Then the comments of the reviewers will be sent to the authors and the authors are expected to submit the revised version within two weeks of receiving the comments.

Manuscript categories and requirements

The papers submitted to the Journal should not have been published previously in the same, or any other form or language, or being considered for publication elsewhere. However, publications appearing as abstracts or as part of a published lecture or thesis may be submitted as a research paper. Tropical Agriculture Research and Extension will consider manuscripts in the following categories:

Full-length original research papers should include a title page, abstract, keywords, introduction, materials and methods, result and discussion, conclusion, acknowledgement, author contribution, references, tables and figures. The number of words is limited to 10,000 including tables, figures and references. Longer articles only are considered under exceptional conditions of the scientific content.
Reviews are invited contributions from experts, which comprehensively summarize and critically discuss the current state of knowledge in a particular area related to the fields of agriculture. Review papers are generally limited to a maximum of 20,000 words including figures tables and references. Review papers should include an abstract, acknowledgement, author contribution, references, and the rest of the content can present with headings and subheadings appropriate to the manuscript.
Short communications addressing new ideas, controversial opinions, negative results and much more can also be submitted. It should be written under the subheadings as in a research paper but should include only a few key references. It may include 1-2 tables or figures and the word count should be confined to a maximum of 3,500.
Research notes discussing new ideas, theoretical perspectives, methodological approaches can be submitted. The word count should not exceed 3000.Case studies, book reviews, opinions, commentaries and notes are also published.
Case studies, book reviews, opinions, commentaries and notes are also published.

Parts of the Manuscript
The following format is designed for Full-length Original Research Articles and should be modified appropriately for manuscripts in other categories. Manuscripts must be typed using Times New Roman, font size 12 in double space. The manuscript should be arranged as follows,

Title Page: The title page should contain:

Title: A short informative title not exceeding 150 characters. The title should not contain abbreviations.
Running Title: An abbreviated form of the main title usually cited at the top of each published left-hand text pages. Running title serves to guide a reader while scanning through a journal or toggling through multiple pages of the journal online.
Authors names should be indicated with initials and the corresponding author should be marked with an asterisk after the name (ex:-Silva ACD, Perera SP* and Medis WPCD).
Contact Information: The author's institutional affiliations where the work was conducted, with a footnote for the author’s present address if different from where the work was conducted. Please note that valid contact information (mobile number and email address) of each co-author should be submitted to obtain their consent for publication.

Main Text: The main text should be presented in the following order:

i . Title: A short informative title not exceeding 150 characters. The title should not contain abbreviations.

ii. Abstract: No more than 200 words containing the major keywords. This should provide a concise statement of the question(s) motivating the work done, the scope of the work and the principal findings.

iii. Keywords: Please provide five-ten keywords.

iv. Main text:

Introduction: This should argue the case for your study, outlining essential background. It should not be a full review of the subject area but provide enough information on previously published evidence to lead to a clear statement of the open question(s) addressed. Note that the importance of the question should be argued on scientific grounds. Simply stating that the question has not yet been addressed in the particular field is not sufficient unless it is supported with the scientific rationale.
Materials and Methods: This should provide sufficient details of the techniques used to allow them to be repeated. This part also needs to include a clear description of the experimental design including information on times, sample sizes and replication, as well as a description of the statistical analyses carried out.
Results and Discussion: This should include a precise description of the obtained results supported by the provided tables and figures. The significance of the results and place them in the context of other work. It should not introduce new material, be over-speculative, reiterate the results, or exceed 20% of the total length.

Acknowledgements: All sources of institutional, private and corporate financial support for the work within the manuscript must be fully acknowledged, and any potential conflicts of interest noted.
Author contribution: Specify the contribution of each author of your manuscript. Please type each author’s LAST NAME as shown in the example below,
Ex: AB and BCD designed the study. AB, DE and BCD performed the xyz experiments. AB. and FGH performed XYZ experiments. AB and FGH analysed the data. AB, BCD and DE wrote the paper with input from all authors. All authors discussed the results and commented on the manuscript.
References: Authors are strongly encouraged to cite primary research papers. References should be followed alphabetically. In-text citations include the author (without initials) and year of publication, either both inside parentheses or with the author names in running text and the date in parentheses, e.g. (Malik 2020). For multiple citations within parentheses, arrange them in chronological order, e.g. (Jhon et al. 2008; Malik 2020; Peter and Sing 2021). Items should only include articles that have been published or are currently in press. Please follow the examples given below,

Referencing examples :

Journal article
Bayer C, Mielniczuk J, Martin-Neto L and Ernani PR 2002 Stocks and humification degree of organic matter fractions as affected by no-tillage on a subtropical soil. Plant and Soil, 238:133- 140, viewed 12 April 2021, <https.//doi.org/10.1023/A:1014284329618>
When journal articles are listed, the full journal name should be given. For journal articles retrieved from a website (other than Library databases), include a viewed date and URL.

Book
Giller KE 2001 Nitrogen fixation in tropical cropping systems. CABI Publishing, Wallingford, UK

Section of book
Wang S 2018 From special economic zones to special technological zones, In C Hsieh and M Lu (eds), Changing China: a geographic appraisal, Taylor & Francis, Boulder, CO, pp.137-155.

Book: Translator & Author
Jablonka, I 2018, History is a contemporary literature: manifesto for the social sciences, trans. N Bracher, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY.

Book: Organization as Author
Britannica Educational Publishing 2018, Statistics and probability, Britannica Educational Publishing, Chicago, IL.

E-book: From a Website
Fetter FA 1904 The principles of economics: with applications to practical problems, Century, viewed 21 January 2019, <https://www.gutenberg.org/files/40077/40077-h/40077-h.htm>.

Multiple works same author, different years
Fujishin R 2016 Natural bridges: a guide to interpersonal communication, Routledge, Abbingdon, England.
Fujishin R 2018 The natural speaker, 9th edn, Routledge, New York.
Order multiple works by the same authors by year of publication, earliest first.

Multiple works same author, same year
Branford A and Coutts L 2015a The precious ring, Walker Books Australia, Newtown, NSW.
Branford A and Coutts L 2015b The wishing seed, Walker Books Australia, Newtown, NSW.

Secondary Sources: When you are referring to the ideas or words of an author who has been referenced in the book you are referencing
Hurlbut JB 2017 Experiments in democracy: human embryo research and the politics of bioethics, Columbia University Press, New York, NY.
Provide the reference for the book that you actually read.

Web page in a website
Hansen M 2017 Why crypto regulation is doomed to fail, online video, viewed 15 May 2018, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ay5EDAleaj4>.

Thesis
Shaw L 2016 The meanings of new money: social constructions of value in the rise of digital currencies, PhD thesis, University of Washington, Seattle, WA.
For thesis available online, include viewed date and URL

Conference Paper-Online
Winstone N and Boud D 2017 Supporting students’ engagement with feedback: the adoption of student-focused feedback practices in the UK and Australia, Annual Conference of the Society for Research into Higher Education (SRHE), Newport, South Wales, 6-8 December 2017, viewed 22 May, 2018 <https://www.srhe.ac.uk/conference2017/abstracts/0074.pdf>.

Conference Paper-print
Hay B 2016 Drone tourism: a study of the current and potential use of drones in hospitality and tourism, CAUTHE 2016: the changing landscape of tourism and hospitality: the impact of emerging markets and emerging destinations, Blue Mountains, Sydney, 8-11 February, 2016, pp. 49-68.
IAENG (International Association of Engineers) 2017, World Congress on Engineering 2017, Imperial College, London, UK, 5-7 July 2017
This example shows how to deal with organizations as corporate authors.

Conference Paper-unpublished
Tomscha S 2017 Wetlands for people and place: developing a blueprint for ecosystem service restoration in wetlands, paper presented at the EIANZ Annual Conference, Tu Kaha: Stand tall, Wellington, New Zealand, 29 October -1 November 2017.

Tables: Each table should be on a separate page, numbered, and accompanied by a title and explanatory caption at the top. Each table must be referred to in the text, and an indication of the preferred position in the text should be given. Data must not be presented in both tabular and graphical form. Tables should be self-contained and complement, not duplicate, the information contained in the text. They should be supplied as editable files, not pasted as images. Legends should be concise but comprehensive – the table, legend, and footnotes must be understandable without reference to the text. All abbreviations must be defined in footnotes. Footnote symbols: †, ‡, §, ¶, should be used (in that order) and *, **, *** should be reserved for P-values. Statistical measures such as SD or SEM should be identified in the headings.
Figures:Although authors are encouraged to send the highest-quality figures possible, for peer-review purposes, a wide variety of formats, sizes, and resolutions are accepted. For initial peer review, please include a legend under each figure. They should contain the minimum amount of information that is necessary to understand the figure without reference to the main text (self-explanatory). Essential explanatory material should be placed in the legend and not in the figure although labels can also be included in the figure if it is helpful for the reader.
Additional Files
Supporting Information
Supporting Information can be a useful way for an author to include important but ancillary information with the online version of an article. Examples of Supporting Information include additional tables, data sets, figures, movie files, audio clips, 3D structures, and other related nonessential multimedia files. Supporting Information should be cited within the article text, and a descriptive legend should be included. It is published as supplied by the author, and the proof is not made available before publication; for these reasons, authors should provide any Supporting Information in the desired final format.

General advice on formatting and style

Line Numbers: Insert line numbers for your manuscript for convenience during the review process.
Abbreviations: In general, terms should not be abbreviated unless they are used repeatedly, and the abbreviation is helpful to the reader. Initially, use the word in full, followed by the abbreviation in parentheses. Thereafter use the abbreviation only.
Units of measurement: Measurements should be given in SI or SI-derived units.
Numbers: numbers under 10 are spelt out, except for measurements with a unit (8mmol/l); age (6 weeks old), or lists with other numbers (11 dogs, 9 cats, 4 gerbils).
Trade names: Chemical substances should be referred to by the generic name only. Trade names should not be used. If proprietary chemicals have been used in the study, refer to these by their generic name, mentioning the proprietary name and the name and location of the manufacturer in parentheses.
Scientific names: The complete scientific name (genus, species, authority and cultivar, if appropriate) should be cited for every organism when first mentioned. Subsequently, the generic name may be abbreviated to initials except where intervening references to other genera would confuse. Common names of organisms, if used, must be accompanied by the correct scientific name on the first mention. Latin names should be written in italics.
Mathematical formulae: Mathematical formulae should be indented and adequate spacing should be allowed above and below displayed equations. When a manuscript contains several mathematical equations, each principal equation should be identified by a number in parentheses (e.g., Eqn 1).

Manuscript submission

Once the submission materials have been prepared following the Author Guidelines, manuscripts should be submitted online at https://tare.sljol.info/. If you require assistance, please contact the Editorial Office (tare.agricc@gmail.com)

Authors should kindly note that submission implies that the content has not been published or submitted for publication elsewhere except as a brief abstract in the proceedings of a scientific meeting or symposium.

Author’s requirement to sign in ORCID: Authors need to sign up for ORCID and submit their ORCID numbers to the journal at the time of submission of the manuscript. More information on ORCID is available is at https://orcid.org.

When you have submitted your paper, the members of the editorial board will check the suitability and then two experts in the field or allied fields will review it to provide validation, quality control and added value to you in the form of constructive feedback.

Cover letter: This is optional. The cover letter is only seen by the editors and needs to contain the following:

A short paragraph (3-4 sentences) highlighting the importance of the work. Please include the main question addressed, the main answer obtained and why this new knowledge progresses science. Please focus on the most important parts of your study and do not copy the abstract here.
Any scientists you want to exclude from the review process with a justification.

Authorship: The list of authors should accurately illustrate who contributed to the work and how. All those listed as authors should qualify for authorship according to the following criteria:

i. Have made substantial contributions to conception and design, or acquisition of data, or analysis and interpretation of data;
ii. Been involved in drafting the manuscript or revising it critically for important intellectual content;
iii. Given final approval of the version to be published. Each author should have participated sufficiently in the work to take public responsibility for appropriate portions of the content; and
iv. Agreed to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.
v. Contributions from anyone who does not meet the criteria for authorship should be listed, with permission from the contributor, in an Acknowledgments section (for example, to recognize contributions from people who provided technical help, collation of data, writing assistance, acquisition of funding, or a department chairperson who provided general support). Before submitting the article, all authors should agree on the order in which their names will be listed in the manuscript.

Additional Authorship Options: Joint first or senior authorship: In the case of joint first authorship, a footnote should be added to the author listing, e.g. ‘X and Y should be considered joint first author’ or ‘X and Y should be considered the joint senior author.’
Acknowledgements: Contributions from anyone who does not meet the criteria for authorship should be listed, with permission from the contributor, in an Acknowledgments section. Financial and material support should also be mentioned. Thanks to anonymous reviewers are not appropriate.
Conflict of Interest Statement: Authors will be asked to provide a conflict of interest statement during the submission process. For details on what to include in this section, see the ‘Conflict of Interest’ section in the Editorial Policies and Ethical Considerations sections. Submitting authors should ensure they liaise with all co-authors to confirm agreement with the final statement.

Submitting the Revised Manuscript after attending to Reviewers’ Comments

It is highly likely that, if your paper is not rejected, you will be asked to revise it. You will have the opportunity to improve your paper taking into account the expert insights of the reviewers and the editor. This is an opportunity to distil an even better version of your paper so make the most of the invitation. You will also be able to respond to reviewer comments and signal where you have made changes or where you disagree with the advice. Therefore, once you received the reviewers’ comments the manuscript should be revised using a word processing programme. The changes should be indicated in the original manuscript in coloured font. In addition, a separate document should be submitted by answering one by one the reviewers’ comments along with the revised manuscript. No changes to the original manuscript should be done other than as replies to the reviewers’ comments. It is the responsibility of the corresponding author to get consent from all authors for the revisions made to the original manuscript before sending the revised manuscript. This will then be copyedited by the editorial board of the journal before sending it to authors for proofreading. The accepted articles will be published online at https://tare.sljol.info.

Plagiarism policy

All manuscripts are checked for plagiarism. Authors should strictly avoid plagiarism, including self-plagiarism. Manuscripts with over 10% overlapping from the similarity report would not be considered for publication. If the plagiarism is observed by editors, peer reviewers or by the editorial staff at any stage of the publication process, it could be rejected based on the percentile of plagiarism that occurred and it would be notified to the author.

Details of the Editorial Assistants

Dr. DM Gamage, Senior Lecturer, Department of Agric Biology, Faculty of Agriculture, University of Ruhuna Email: dananjali@agbio.ruh.ac.lk

Ms. HLC Himanda, Scientific Assistant, Faculty of Agriculture, University of Ruhuna. Email: himanda@agri.ruh.ac.lk

Contact –Mailing Address
Editor-in-Chief,
Editorial Office/TARE Journal
Faculty of Agriculture,
University of Ruhuna,
Kamburupitiya, 81100,
SRI LANKA.
Tele/Fax/Mail
Office: +94 (0)41 229 2200 (Ext. 381)
Fax : +94 (0)41 229 2384
Email: tare.agricc@gmail.com

Submission Preparation Checklist

As part of the submission process, authors are required to check off their submission's compliance with all of the following items, and submissions may be returned to authors that do not adhere to these guidelines.

The submission has not been previously published, nor is it before another journal for consideration (or an explanation has been provided in Comments to the Editor).
The submission file is in Microsoft Word, RTF, or WordPerfect document file format.
Where available, URLs for the references have been provided.
The text is single-spaced; uses a 12-point font; employs italics, rather than underlining (except with URL addresses); and all illustrations, figures, and tables are placed within the text at the appropriate points, rather than at the end.
The text adheres to the stylistic and bibliographic requirements outlined in the Author Guidelines, which is found in About the Journal.
If submitting to a peer-reviewed section of the journal, the instructions in Ensuring a Blind Review have been followed.

Copyright Notice

From June 2021, all articles in the Tropical Agricultural Research and Extension are licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium provided the original author and source are credited.

Privacy Statement

TARE may collect and use personal information that is necessary for the processing and publication of manuscripts submitted to us. This information may include names, affiliation and contact details; including postal address, emails, phone numbers and fax numbers. Any personal information received by TARE will only be used to process and publish your manuscript.

We take your privacy seriously and we protect your personal information, which will not be made available for any other purpose or to any other party without your permission, or unless legal obligation compels us to do so. However, this website contains links to other websites. Therefore, TARE is not responsible for the privacy policies or practices of any third party. If you have any questions about this privacy policy or TARE treatment of your personal information, please send an email to tare.agricc@gmail.com.

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