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Agronomy Journal Author Instructions

Scope

After critical review and approval by the editorial board, Agronomy Journal (AJ) publishes articles reporting research findings in soil–plant relationships; crop science; soil science; biometry; crop, soil, pasture, and range management; crop, forage, and pasture production and utilization; turfgrass; agroclimatology; agronomic models; integrated pest management; integrated agricultural systems; and various aspects of entomology, weed science, animal science, plant pathology, and agricultural economics as applied to production agriculture.

Continuous Publication 

Under a Continuous Publication model used at Wiley, journal articles are published directly into an online issue with their final citations as soon as they are ready. There is no issue curation and no issue pagination; articles publish when they have completed production and are not held for upcoming issues. The ability to publish an article online before its issue is completed provides faster publishing of articles with final citation details for the academic community. 

Publication fees

Page Charges

Society members: $0

Non-Society members: $200 per page after seven pages.

The corresponding author must be a member to receive the member rate.

Optional Open Access Fee

$2,070

Optional Open Access Fee

After manuscript acceptance, authors have the option of paying an additional open access licensing fee of $2,070 to apply an open access license at the time of publication to make the article freely available without a subscription. These fees are in addition to any applicable author page charges.

Journal articles are published open access under the CC BY-NC-ND (attribution, noncommercial, no derivatives) license. Learn more

Authors may request that their article be published under the CC BY (attribution) license. Learn more

No author page fees are charged for invited reviews, comments, or letters to the editor.

Institutional Funding and Transformational Agreements

Your institution or funder may be able to help with open access licensing fees through a transformational agreement. For qualified authors, fees may be covered in full or part when publishing in the journal. Visit the institutional funder payments web page to learn if you qualify and for more information.

Authors Funded by cOAlition S

If you or one of your co-authors received funding from a member of cOAlition S, there may be restrictions on where you can publish. Please check your agreement with your funder for specific details. The information and author compliance tool on this web page can help you make an informed decision about where to publish in alignment with funder and journal requirements.

Green Open Access

Authors with an open access requirement mandated by a funding agency should purchase one of the two gold open access options with funds designated for publication charges by the funding agency. For other repository requirements, authors may post a PDF of the accepted version of a paper to funder and institutional repositories and/or employer’s sites after a 12-month embargo. Authors may post accepted papers to their own personal websites. The doi link must appear on the PDF.

Manuscript types

Original reports of research that significantly contribute to the advancement of knowledge or toward a better understanding of existing agronomic concepts.

Research articles in Agronomy Journal require robust data that are collected following appropriate protocols based on the stated objective(s) and hypothesis(es). Appropriate experimental design, repetition of experimental runs (i.e., multiple sites and/or years, depending on scope of the research), and statistical analyses are required. Results should provide compelling evidence that conclusions are valid over a range of environments and/or years. 

Longer, more comprehensive articles, presenting interpretation of data that has largely been previously published.

Generally shorter, notes report apparatus, observations, and experimental techniques, and are usually limited to studies and reports of unrepeatable phenomena/unique circumstances.

Manuscript Submission

Download the AJ Manuscript Submission Template and Pre-Submission Manuscript Formatting Checklist. Submit manuscripts at the AJ Manuscript Submission Site. American Society of Agronomy (ASA), Crop Science Society of America (CSSA), and Soil Science Society of America (SSSA) journals follow the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (APA style) for references. Consult our Publications Handbook and Style Manual for specific questions about style.

AJ operates under a double-blind peer review process. Authors are responsible for ensuring their manuscript is anonymized for review. A separate document containing any relevant identifying information, including author lists, affiliations, acknowledgments, or anything else that could be used to identify any of the authors should be uploaded as a title page. AJ will consider articles for review that were previously available as preprints. However, authors should note that sharing their manuscript in preprint form may compromise their anonymity during peer review.

Before submitting the paper, the corresponding author should send each living coauthor a draft copy of the manuscript and obtain the coauthors’ assent to coauthorship. Authors are responsible for obtaining all permissions for use of figures or other material from other publishers and should supply these permissions when the manuscript is accepted. Authors are also responsible for obtaining permission from individuals whose images are included in photographs. Note that ASA, CSSA, and SSSA reserve the right to publish and republish any images you submit with a manuscript.

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Article Requirements

Please submit the manuscript file in Word format containing the title, abstract, text, references, figures, and tables. The submission should contain the following elements:

  • Title page
  • Abstract
  • Plain Language Summary
  • Abbreviations
  • Text
  • Supplemental Material statement
  • AI Declaration statement
  • Data Availability statement (optional)
  • Author Contributions
  • Acknowledgments (at acceptance)
  • References
  • Figure captions
  • Figures* (figures may also be submitted separately as high-resolution image files in the following acceptable formats: EPS, TIF, PDF, or JPEG)
  • Tables*

*Tables and figures (review quality) with captions should be placed into the text document at first mention. If the manuscript is accepted for publication, figures must also be submitted separately as high-resolution image files in the following acceptable formats: PDF, EPS, TIF, or JPEG.

Paper Structure

The title page should include a title preferably 12 words or fewer (not counting conjunctions or prepositions). Note: the author line and affiliations are omitted from the first page to keep the authors anonymous during review.

An informative, self-explanatory abstract not exceeding 250 words (150 words for notes) must be included. It should state specifically why and how the study was made, what the results were, and why they are important.

Additional formatting requirements

Nomenclature. Both the accepted common name and the chemical name of pesticides must be given upon first mention in the manuscript. Use chemical symbols for elements, ions, and simple compounds except at the beginning of a sentence or in a title or heading. The Latin binomial or trinomial (and authority for plants) must be included with the common name for all plants, insects, pathogens, and animals at first mention. When referring to soils, give at least the subgroup in accord with the US system of soil taxonomy. Ideally, both the series and complete family name should be given.

Math. Use keyboard formatting where possible (i.e., bold, super-/subscripts, simple variables, Greek font, etc.); if needed, use MathType (preferred) or Word Equation Editor (only if MathType is not available). 

Units of Measure. The International System of Units (SI) must be used. Other units may be indicated in parentheses after the SI unit if this helps understanding or is needed for replication of the work.

Official Sources

For questions about the format of submissions, the process of submitting a manuscript, or about the status of manuscripts that have been submitted and assigned a manuscript number, please contact the AJ program manager.

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