Submissions

Author Guidelines

Pesquisa Agropecuária Tropical (PAT) [Agricultural Research in the Tropics] is the scientific journal published on-line (e-ISSN 1983-4063) by the Escola de Agronomia, Universidade Federal de Goiás, Brazil. It aims mainly to publish Scientific Articles directly related to the context of agriculture.

The types of manuscript that can be submitted to the PAT journal are: Research Article (must feature an effective contribution to the advancement of science, technology and/or innovation, supported by hypotheses and methods with legitimate theoretical and practical support, followed by in-depth analysis and synthesis in the light of explicit empirical evidence, supporting original scientific conclusions), Review Article (must cover gaps in the systematization of knowledge that deserve updated, original and mature bibliographic analysis and synthesis) and Scientific Note (must present, unequivocally, knowledge, products or unpublished processes that require publication priority, given that they deal with an emergency topic and/or that justify precedence of authorship and intellectual protection). The submission of manuscripts already published in conference proceedings or deposited on preprint servers is not accepted.

Submissions are free of charge and made only on-line, through the website https://www.revistas.ufg.br/pat. All authors must express, through the correspondent author, their agreement concerning the submission, editorial policy and norms for publication in the PAT journal. 

The PAT Journal recommends a maximum of 5 (five) authors per article. For more than that, a detailed description of each author's contribution must be sent to the Editorial Board (note: the mere participation in data collection, or support of infrastructural nature, does not justify authorship, although may be credited in the Acknowledgments section). After the submission, the inclusion of new co-authors will not be allowed.

While submitting a manuscript, the correspondent author must also attest, in the name of all authors, the originality of the paper, that it is not being submitted simultaneously to other periodicals, and that they are in accordance with the format required for files, as well as with the copyright policies which will be applied if the manuscript is published. For researches dealing directly with animals or human beings as their main focus, a previous approval from an Ethics in Research Committee should be presented. If there are potential sources of conflict of interest (any interest or relationship, financial or not, that may influence the results of a study; for example, financing from a commercial company, commercial interest in the publication, participation in the board of directors or advisory committee of a company directly linked to the study, granted patents or pending applications), authors should report them, under penalty of rejection of the manuscript, or other applicable sanctions. In addition, the author must enter the called metadata (information about the authors and the paper, such as title, abstract, keywords - only in the idiom of the manuscript), and transfer the files with the manuscript and supplementary files.

Manuscripts may be written in Portuguese or English, but will only be published in English. The final version of the manuscript must be reviewed by an English language specialist (preferably a native speaker). This process must be carried out by the authors, without any onus for the journal.

Submissions may contain up to 20 pages. The text must be written using Microsoft Word for Windows (maximum size of 2MB, .doc version), A-4 paper size (210 x 297 mm), with 2.5 cm margins, single column, double spaced (also applied to tables, headers, footers and references). The font should be Times New Roman, 12 points. Underlining and bold characters should be avoided, and all pages and lines must be numbered. Manuscripts submitted to PAT must also obey the following specifications:

1. Articles must be organized in the following order: Type of article (Research Article, Review Article or Scientific Note); Title (20 words maximum); Abstract (up to 250 words; a good abstract first presents the problem and then the objectives of the study); Keywords (three words minimum, five words maximum, separated by commas); Introduction; Material and Methods; Results and Discussion; Conclusions; and References. For Scientific Notes, the sections Introduction, Material and Methods, Results and Discussion and Conclusions must be suppressed. For all types of article,Title, Abstract and Keywords may be presented only in the idiom of the manuscript, at this stage. Acknowledgements and information related to the title of papers, as well as the authors' names, along with their respective affiliation, address and e-mail address, detailed in numbered footnotes, must only be inserted in the final corrected version of the manuscript, after it is definitively accepted for publishing.

2. The citations must use the "author-year" system. Only the first letter of the author's last name should be capitalized, and the author and year are separated by a single empty space. E.g.: (Gravena 1984, Zucchi 1985). The "&" symbol is used for two authors, and "et al." for three or more. E.g.: (Gravena & Zucchi 1987, Zucchi et al. 1988). If the author is mentioned directly in the text, just the year comes inside parenthesis. Secondary citations should be avoided, as well as the following sources: article in a preliminary version (in press or pre-print) or from a serial publication that is not peer-reviewed; summary of a paper presented in a scientific event; oral communication; information from poster sessions or panel discussions at a scientific event; private communications of unpublished documents; e-mails; or private sites on the Internet.

3. References must be arranged by listing the authors' last name in alphabetical order, according to the NBR 6023:2018 norm, written by the Associação Brasileira de Normas Técnicas (ABNT), with the following adjustment: it is not necessary to include the city after journal titles. Italics must be used to highlight titles and periodical titles cited in full.

4. Tables (also using Times New Roman 12 points and double spaced) and figures, placed along the text, must be identified by Arabic numerals and always be referred in the text by these numbers. Tables must be drawn in black and white, using single lines, 0.5 point thickness (Microsoft Word for Windows standard), and their footnotes must be numbered. Terms such as "the table above" or "the figure below" must not be used. Figures should be presented with a minimum resolution of 300 dpi.

5. The Board of Editors recommends that authors always take a look at the articles recently published by PAT (https://www.revistas.ufg.br/pat), in order to solve doubts about these instructions.

6. Authors will not be paid for published articles and must waive their copyright in favor of the PAT journal. On the other hand, authors are solely responsible for the content of those articles, even if the Editor holds the right to adjust them to the norms of the journal. Authors are allowed to publish their articles simultaneously in their institutional repositories, as soon as the original publication at the PAT journal is mentioned. In addition, in order to ensure the preservation, allow the reuse and attest the reproducibility of the conclusions of each published study, the Editorial Board recommends and encourages the publication in public repositories, by the authors, of research data and/or programming codes used in the data analysis, emphasizing their relation to the publication at the PAT journal.