EDITORIAL POLICY

Editorial Policy

MEDICAL JOURNAL encourages article submissions. If you have an article you think would fit our coverage of the agricultural biotechnology industry, please submit your writing based on the guidelines listed below. Because we are a paperless journal, all submissions should be sent electronically via our Manuscript FastTrack™ submission and manuscript tracking system. Articles accepted by the editor are reviewed through a double-blind referee process. Submission of a paper will be held to imply that it contains original work and has not been submitted elsewhere. The editor does not accept responsibility for damage or loss of submitted papers.

A complete stylesheet—giving detailed information on tables, figures, references, numbers, equations, and ordering of manuscript sections—is available here in Word format.

Papers should be submitted in the following format:

Papers must be in English and should not exceed 8,000 words or 24 double-spaced pages, not including diagrams, figures, and tables. In addition, each paper should contain an abstract and a key word list. Abstract: Please submit an abstract of not more than 150 words. The abstract should give a clear idea of the line of reasoning in the paper and the main conclusions made. Abstracts should not include equations, diagrams, footnotes, or parenthetical references, but may include numbers. Key Words List: Give no more than ten key words in alphabetical order. Consider standard words or terms that describe your methodology, empirical investigation, and conclusions. If a common abbreviation or synonym is used, please include this in addition to the standard word(s).
Submissions should include the author’s name, title, organization, address, telephone, fax, and e-mail address.
The text of the paper should be submitted electronically via our Manuscript FastTrack™ submission and manuscript tracking system as a text, Word, or RTF format with the following document setup: 8.5″ x 11″ page size
1.25″ margins
11 point Times Roman
double-spaced A Word template, including all AgBioForum paragraph styles and our preferred manuscript ordering, is available here, although you are not required to use it. Please use character formatting—that is, formatting you can do on single characters or words (bold for vectors and matrices, italic for variables, superscript, subscript).
Simple tables may be included at the end of the manuscript. Examples of how tables should look can be found these previous published papers: Wilson, Janzen, and Dahl; Wolf et al.; Li et al.. If figures or graphs are necessary, please include them as MS Excel file(s). You should include the raw summarized data from which you derived the figure in the file. Examples of how figures should look can be found in these previous published papers: Marchant, Fang, and Song; Trigo and Cap.
The use of footnotes should be minimized. If footnotes are necessary, they should be numbered consecutively throughout the paper, not page by page. Footnotes should be explanatory only and not used for citations.
All major words of headings and subheadings should be capitalized, excluding articles and short prepositions. Bullets can be used to highlight lists.
References should follow American Psychological Association (APA) style, including the parenthetical references (author, date) as well as the reference list. The reference list is titled “References” and should be in alphabetical order by author name. If there are two articles by the same author, then the author’s name is again written in full. This follows the APA style. If there are two or more articles by the same author, then they should be ordered according to year with the most recent ordered first. If there are two articles with the same author and the same year, then they should be ordered alphabetically by title with the first article being 1998a, the second 1998b, and so on. Example: Hoban, T.J. (1997). Consumer acceptance of biotechnology: An International perspective. Nature Biotechnology, 15, 232-234. Hoban, T.J. (1996a). How Japanese consumers view biotechnology. Food Technology, 50(7), 85-88. Hoban, T.J. (1996b). Trends in consumer attitudes about biotechnology. Journal of Food Distribution Research, 27(1), 1-10.

Notes and Comments Shorter notes and comments, of up to 500 words, will also be considered for publication. Such notes might appropriately deal with the economic and management aspects of current agricultural biotechnology policy or position statements on a specific policy issue. In addition, formal comments are welcomed on articles previously published in AgBioForum. Please submit comments to the editor of AgBioForum, using the guidelines listed above, without including an abstract or keywords.