Submissions

Author Guidelines

AFRIMED AJ - Al Awamia is a quarterly scientific journal published by the National Institute of Agronomic Research (INRA). It publishes original articles devoted to agricultural research and social research related to issues of agriculture and rural development. Publication in its pages is subject to a system of refereeing in accordance with international practices. As of the beginning of 2025, the only language accepted by the journal is English. For the presentation of an article, please consult the presentation guidelines.

1. Submission

We only accept online submissions of manuscripts via the URL address: https://revues.imist.ma/index.php/Afrimed/ The manuscript must be sent, after registration, to the Editorial Office electronically. See the presentation instructions for the preparation of articles below. The file size (Word format) must not exceed 10 MB. The acknowledgement of receipt is sent to the author who submitted the manuscript to the platform, including the file number to be cited in all subsequent correspondence.

Article processing fees

Free.

2. Evaluation of manuscripts

The decision to accept an article is based mainly on its scientific content. However, poor writing or sloppy presentation may result in the rejection of a manuscript.

Any manuscript sent to AFRIMED AJ - Al Awamia is subject to blind evaluation by a minimum of two evaluators (or more, depending on the topic) who judge, on the basis of a pre-established grid, the quality of the submitted text.

The reviewers must evaluate the manuscripts according to the merit of their contribution to the field of study and the intellectual content. They must be objective in their critiques, leave aside any personal criticism of the author or his research group, and support their opinions with clearly stated arguments. In case of similarity between the manuscript reviewed and any other published work, the reviewers must report it to the editor of the journal.

The reports produced by reviewers help authors to improve their manuscripts and the editor to make an editorial decision on the manuscript. Thus, the submitted manuscript may be accepted without reservation, or accepted subject to modifications or rejected. It should be noted that if the author does not respond to the improvements proposed by the reviewers within 3 weeks, the editor-in-chief reserves the right to reject the article in question. The responsibility for publishing an article or rejecting it lies with the editor-in-chief of the journal. He may also consult the associate editor to make this decision.

The editorial staff of the journal reserves the right to plan the insertion of approved and corrected manuscripts as it sees fit. Once published, a manuscript automatically becomes the property of INRA and its reproduction is subject to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License CC-BY-NC-ND.

3. Plagiarism / Copyright

We have a zero tolerance policy towards plagiarism (including self-plagiarism) and copyright violations. If it comes to our attention that any article submitted/published in our journal has violated copyright or is plagiarized, it will be immediately removed and the authors will be permanently blacklisted from the journal. It is the sole responsibility of the author to obtain permission to use copyrighted material from other sources (including the web).

4. Submission Guidelines for the Preparation of an Article

The submitted manuscript should be no longer than twenty (20) pages, with tables, illustrations, and figures placed in the text at the appropriate points, rather than at the end, in a single Word file.

• Terms of Use

• Page size: A4 (8.27" × 11.69").
• Page orientation: Portrait preferred.
• Page margins: At least 1 inch or 2.5 cm on all sides.
• Font: Times New Roman or Arial, 12 point throughout the manuscript.
• Line spacing: One and a half lines (1.5 lines) in all parts of the manuscript.
• Page numbers: All pages should be numbered consecutively starting from the title page.
• Units: Use SI units and indicate the equivalent SI units in parentheses when the use of other units is unavoidable.
• Abbreviations and symbols of units of measurement: in accordance with international recommendations.
• Nomenclature of compounds: such as amino acids, carbohydrates, lipids, steroids and vitamins should follow the recommendations of the IUPAC-IUB Commission on Biochemical Nomenclature.
• Chemical structures: Chemical structures should be prepared according to the guidelines below. Structures should be prepared using an appropriate drawing program, e.g. ChemDraw, Chem-Sketch and integrated into the text as a high-resolution image. Bold numbers should identify all chemical structures. If a name is also used to describe the compound, the associated bold number should be in parentheses, e.g. "compound (1)".
  • Structure of the article

Title Page The title page should clearly contain the following information:

• Title of the article: The title should be short, between 5 and 12 words, informative and precise. It should be written in lowercase with a size of 16. •Authors' Name: Last name and First name of each author.
• Authors' Affiliations: The name and address of the department(s) and institution(s) to which the authors belong. For each author, after the affiliation, specify the function and E-mail address.
• Corresponding Author: Identify the corresponding author and specify his/her E-mail and telephone number.

Please note that all authors must agree on the submission of the manuscript and their official names, affiliations and E-mail addresses provided. Corresponding authors must ensure that each author has approved all submissions, including revisions.

Abstract

The abstract should be a maximum of 250 words, summarizing the content of the article. It is important, especially for indexing services, that it is intelligible independently of the article. It should be informative and completely self-explanatory, briefly introducing the topic, indicating the scope of the experiments, indicating important data, and emphasizing the main results and conclusions. It should not contain a footnote or reference to tables, figures, or the bibliography.

Keywords

Authors are invited to provide 3 to 6 keywords that they consider to be the most representative of their text.

Main Text Manuscripts should contain a clear and concise description of the experimental design used; with sufficient detail so that, in the case where analysis of variance or regression models are to be used in the statistical evaluation, the reader is fairly clear about how the error term was estimated. Statistical tests should be briefly described and, if necessary, supported by references.

The recommended structure for a scientific research article is:

• Title page;
• Abstract followed by keywords;
• Introduction;
• Material and methods;
• Results;
• Discussion;
• Conclusions;
• Conflicts of interest (if any);
• Acknowledgments;
• Supplementary material (if any);
• Bibliographic references.

Bibliographic summaries do not follow a fixed structure. In addition to the title page and the abstract followed by keywords, this will vary according to the needs and objectives of the author(s).

An article concerning a new varietal creation will include the following sections: - Title page;

- Abstract followed by keywords;

- Name; - Origin of the breeding;

- Breeder;

- Selection method

- Morphology, agronomic characteristics, quality, and bibliographic references.

Tables / Figures / Illustrations

1. Tables should be embedded in the text in Microsoft Word table format, while figures and illustrations should be embedded as high-resolution images
2. Each table should have a title at the top explaining what the table shows. Detailed captions may be provided at the bottom of the table. For figures, figures, and illustrations, titles should be at the bottom and may be followed by captions.
3. Tables should be kept to a minimum and designed to be as simple as possible.
4. Columns and rows of data should be made visibly distinct by ensuring that the borders of each cell appear as black lines.
5. Tables, figures, and illustrations should be numbered consecutively in the order in which they are cited in the body of the text.

Acknowledgments

Concise acknowledgment of contributors not listed as authors is welcome. Authors may acknowledge the funding agency, a person who provided purely technical assistance or editorial assistance, or a department chair who provided only general support.

Bibliographic references

The author must ensure that all bibliographic references are complete and correct. All references in the list must correspond to the references cited in the the reference and vice versa. Two or more articles by the same author are presented in chronological order; two or more from the same year are differentiated by a letter (a, b, c, etc.).

For a given author, the articles that he wrote alone precede those of which he is the principal author. The order of the names of the co-authors determines the classification of articles with the same principal author. In case where, within this type of classification, there are several references with the same authors, they are classified chronologically.

It is not recommended to make links to notes and/or references that risk disappearing during editorial work.

For the writing of bibliographic references, the standards of the AFRIMED AJ - Al Awamia journal are as follows:

Periodical article

Ait El Aouad B., Aderdour T., Chetto O., Handaji N., Benkirane R. et Benyahia H. (2019). Friable Callus induction and organogenesis conditions in a few strains of Poncirus Trifoliata. Plant Cell Biotechnology and Molecular Biology. Vol. 20 (17&18) : 734-745.

Book

Moussaoui M., Al Balghiti A., Dahan R., El Mourid M. and Kradi C. (2017). Impact of agricultural research  of INRA. Edition: 84 pages.

Book chapter

Yigezu A. Y., Boughlala M., El-Shater T., Najjar D. and Bentaibi A. (2019). Analysis of the adoption, impacts, and seed demand of improved varieties. In Political Economy of the Wheat Sector in Morocco : Seed systems, varietal adoption, and impacts. ICARDA Edition : 87-190.

Technical sheet & working document

Nabloussi A., El Asri M., Essahat A., Hamal A. and El Fechtali M. (2019). Rapeseed cultivation. Technical sheet. INRA Edition: 23 pages.

Communication at a conference (abstract)

Guessous C., Aboulkassim A. et Azim K. (2019). Organic agriculture movement in Morocco (FIMABIO). In 1st EU/North-African Conference on Organic Agriculture. Marrakech Morocco, 11 - 12 November 2019 : 23.

Thesis

El Iraqui El Houssaini S. (2016). The Codling Moth (Cydia pomonella L. (1758), Lepidoptera Tortricidae): Spatio-temporal evolution of populations, voltinism and demonstration of resistance to certain insecticides in the Azrou region. Doctoral thesis (Hassan II Agronomic and Veterinary Institute, Rabat): 95 pages.

Patent

Bendaou M. (2013). Process for obtaining silage from cactus and argan by-products. WO 2013/105841 Al: 12 pages.

Annual report or bulletin

National Institute for Agricultural Research (INRA). (2019). INRA 2018 activity report. INRA Edition: 88 pages.

Internal document

National Institute for Agricultural Research (INRA). (2018). INRA Laboratories: Platforms for Science and Agriculture. INRA Edition: 80 pages.

Web References

The journal is flexible on how authors handle web references. Please note that it is preferable to put the full URL.

Personal Communication

Exceptionally, personal communications may, if no publication reports the same information, be cited in the text, but under no circumstances in the list of bibliographic references.

Conflicts of Interest

A ´Conflicts of Interest´ section should be included at the end of the manuscript. It should identify any financial or non-financial (political, personal, professional) interests/relationships that may be interpreted to have influenced the manuscript. If there is no conflict of interest, please include the statement "The authors declare no conflicts of interest".

Offprint’s:

Article in final form will be published as embedded PDF file with free online access (open source).

The corresponding author, at no cost, will also be provided with a PDF file of the article via e-mail.