Author Guidelines

FIRST STEPS

Before the submission of your manuscript to the Editorial Support for peer review, you are kindly requested to:

• read the “Focus and Scope”;
• read the “Licence and copyright agreement for IJAm”;
• read the "Author Guidelines for IJAm";
• agree and comply with the “General obligations for authors”;

We recommend that any data set used in your manuscript is submitted to a reliable data repository and linked from your manuscript through a DOI.

GUIDELINES FOR AUTHORS

Types of papers
Original papers (Regular Papers) should report the results of original research. The material should not have been published previously elsewhere.
Reviews should cover a part of the subject of active current interest. Reviews may also include meta-analyses, guidelines and position papers. They may be submitted or invited.
Short Communication is a concise, but complete, description of a limited investigation, which will not be included in a later paper. Short Communications should be as completely documented, both by reference to the literature and description of the experimental procedures employed, as a regular paper. Short communications should be limited to 2,000 words.

Preparation
Please ensure the text of your paper is double-spaced and has consecutive line numbering
Please ensure the figures and the tables included in the single file are placed next to the relevant text in the manuscript, rather than at the bottom or the top of the file. The corresponding caption should be placed directly below the figure or table.

Article structure
First page (title page)

• Title. Concise and informative. Titles are often used in information-retrieval systems. Avoid  abbreviations and formulae where possible.
• Author names, affiliations, ORCID. Please indicate the given name(s) and family name(s), the authors' affiliation addresses below the names and ORCID. Indicate all affiliations with a lower-case superscript letter immediately after the author's name and in front of the appropriate address. Provide the full postal address of each affiliation, including the country name and the e-mail address of each author. Corresponding author should be clearly identified.
• Abstract. The abstract should not exceed 300 words and include the aim of the research, the main results and major conclusions. Non-standard or uncommon abbreviations as well as references should be avoided.
• Keywords. Immediately after the abstract, provide 3 to 5 keywords, avoiding general and plural terms and multiple concepts. Do not use words that appear already in the title of your manuscript to enhance the visibility of your work as they will be used for indexing purposes.

Highlights
Highlights are optional yet highly encouraged. They consist of a short collection of bullet points that capture the novel results as well as new methods of your research. They should include 3 to 5 bullet points (max. 120 characters each)

Introduction
State the objectives of the work and provide an adequate background

Materials and methods
Provide sufficient and detailed information to allow the work to be reproduced by an independent researcher. Methods that are already published should be summarized, and indicated by a reference.

Results
Results should be clear and concise and also provide statistical analysis for all experimental results

Discussion
Please provide a discussion on the significance of the results, not repeat them. Although results and discussion are normally separated, a combined Results and Discussion section can be also accepted. Avoid too extensive citations of published literature and refer to the most updated one.

Conclusions
Conclusions should be a short section providing clear answers to the research questions made in the research, as well as main limitations of the study. Do not use non-standard or case-specific abbreviations and do not include references.

References
All citations into the running text should be given in the references and vice versa.

Article style
The manuscripts should be arranged in a single file, as follows.
Title page: structured as explained in the checklist above
Main text: structured as explained in the checklist above.
Units: authors are recommended to use the International System of Units (SI).
Scientific names: common names of organisms should always be accompanied, when first cited, by their complete scientific name in italics (genus, species, attribution and, if appropriate, cultivar).
Formulae: mathematical formulae must be carefully typed, possibly using the equation editor of Microsoft Word; when a paper contains several equations they should be identified with a number in parentheses (e.g. Eq. 1). Please note that each accepted paper will undergo technical and scientific copyediting before publication.

Tables: tables must be numbered consecutively in accordance with their appearance in the text using Arabic numbers. Avoid vertical rules. Do not use abbreviations in the titles of tables or in the row and column headings. All tables should be clear enough to ‘stand-alone’ and reported data should not be duplicated elsewhere in the manuscript.

Figures and figure captions: figures must be numbered consecutively in accordance with their appearance in the text using Arabic numbers. Make sure that each figure has a caption comprising a brief title (not on the figure itself) and a description of the illustration. Any symbols and abbreviations used in figures should be explained in the figure caption.
Please make sure that artwork files are in an acceptable format (TIFF (or JPEG), EPS (or PDF) and with the correct resolution. Color figures will be published only online, so make sure that a black and white/grays version will be suitable for printing.

References
All citations in the text should refer to:
Single author: the author's name (without initials) and the year of publication (Rossi, 2020)
Two authors: both authors' names and the year of publication (Rossi and Jones, 2020)
Three or more authors: first author's name followed by 'et al.' and the year of publication (Rossi et al., 2020)
Groups of references can be listed either first alphabetically, then chronologically, or vice versa. More than one reference from the same author(s) in the same year must be identified by the letters 'a', 'b', 'c', etc., placed after the year of publication (Rossi, 2000a, 2000b, 1999; Rossi and Jones, 1999)
List: References should be arranged first alphabetically and then further sorted chronologically if necessary.

Examples
1. Reference to journal publications:
Stewart R.B., Rouse W.R., 1976. A simple method for determining the evaporation from shallow lakes and ponds. Water Resources Research, 12 (4): 623-628.
2. Reference to books:
Shuttleworth W.J., 1993. Evaporation. In: Maidment DR (ed) Handbook of hydrology. New York: McGraw Hill.
3. Reference to proceedings:
Tanner B., Greene J., Bingham G., 1987. A Bowen ratio design for long term measurements. In: Proceedings of the International Winter Meeting of the ASAE, Hyatt Regency, Chicago, USA.
4. Reference to thesis:
Rossi A., 1999. Stima della bagnatura fogliare. Degree Diss., Università di Firenze, Italy.
5. Reference to Web site:
The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2020. http://www.fao.org/publications/en/.
6. Other:
Personal communication, unpublished data, etc. should be incorporated in the text and NOT placed into the Reference section.

Supplementary material
Supplementary material such as images or tables, can be published with your article. Submitted supplementary items are published exactly as they are received (Excel or PowerPoint files will appear as such online). Please submit your material together with the article and supply a concise, descriptive caption for each file.