The Corresponding Author must submit the manuscript online-only through our Manuscript Submission System.

Manuscript preparation

Should be saved and submitted as a single WORD file containing the full text, references, maps, tables and figures. In case of acceptance, original text and figures must be provided for publication.

Original Articles: should normally be divided into an abstract, introduction, materials and methods, results and discussion, conclosions and references. The abstract should contain a maximum of 300 words. A maximum of 12 authors is permitted, and additional authors should be listed in an ad hoc appendix.

Review Articles: no particular format is required for these articles. However, they should have an informative, unstructured abstract of about 250 words. Reviews may also include meta-analyses, guidelines and consensus papers by scientific societies or working groups. These studies must be conducted following proper, widely accepted ad hoc procedures.

Short Communications: are articles with a simple layout and containing limited data (no more than two figures or tables) and a small number of citations (not more than 25). They should be limited to 2,000 words of text (figure captions, table headings and references lists are additional to this limit).

Letters to the editor: should be from 250 to 1,000 words in length. Authors of letters to the editor should provide a short title for their letter.

IMPORTANT: Checklist for Authors submitting manuscript to the Iraqi Journal of Desert Studies. Editors will NOT send to reviewers most articles that will not be compliant to the following suggestions:

1. Title:

• try to avoid titles like e.g. "Effects of nitrification inhibitors on nitrate leaching in maize" or including the name of the specific geographic area where the research was done.
• Titles should reveal clearly what are the main findings of the study e.g. in the form of a strong statement like e.g. "Nitrification inhibitors are not effective in preventing nitrate leaching in maize cropping systems".
• keep your title as short as possible, moving details to the first or second sentence of the abstract.

2. Key words:

• choose your key words carefully so that they are easily recognized worldwide in the scientific domain. e.g. grassland is better than pasture; alfalfa is better than Lucerne. Check with search engines (e.g. Scholar) the occurrence of synonyms and prefer the word with higher occurrence.
• use common keywords, usually 1 word per keyword, rarely more than 2 words.
• double check that the keywords used in the title and in the keyword sections are also repeated (consistent) in the manuscript text

3. Abstract:

repeat your relevant keywords 3-6 times in the abstract text to improve search engine discoverability.

4. Introduction:

• please check that the introduction text clearly frames the main research questions of the proposed study into a wide international scientific debate, with updated references.
• for the experimental studies, include the hypothesis/es and objectives in the final part of the introduction.

5. Results and Discussion:

• double check the consistency of results in tables and figures.
• use the international system of units (SI).
• check that number approximation is adequate in relation to the magnitude; do not use more digits that are allowed by the accuracy of your measurements, even for derived statistics and computations.
• always provide some measure of variability for all experimental results, e.g. standard errors, coefficients of variation, least significant differences.
• please double check full consistency with hypotheses made in the introduction in the discussion structure.
• frame your results in the international scientific debate by possibly referring to most updated scientific literature.
• do not repeat results in the discussion section: just discuss them.
• Avoid fragmenting research to maximize the number of articles submitted to a journal, and the submission of the same research to multiple books/journals or other publication media (also known as parallel publishing). Both these practices seriously undermine the innovative nature of research findings.

6. Conclusions:

• provide clear answers to the research questions made by the study, possibly point by point.
• normally the conclusion section does NOT contain references.
• express clearly the boundaries and limitations of the study in relation to methodology used.

7. References: 

double check that all citations are in the references and vice versa.

Style                                          

Writing guidances

Font type: The Simplified Arabic font for the Arabic language and Times New Roman for the English language are chosen within one manuscript.

Font size: The manuscript should be written in a font size of 10, with attention to the following:

Manuscript title: 14 Bold

Authors' names: 10 Blod

Affiliation: 10

keywords: 10

Headlines: 12 bold

Secondary headings: 12 Bold

Titles of tables, maps, and figures: 12 Blod

References: 10

General guidances

The manuscripts should be double spaced with numbered lines and wide margins and should be arranged as follows:

Title page: including the full title, the name(s) of the author(s), their affiliation and the name of the corresponding author to whom proofs and requests for off-prints should be sent.

Main text: should be 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 are numbered consecutively in Arabic numbers. The desired style of presentation can be found in published articles. Titles of tables should be descriptive enough to be able to stand alone. Do not present the same data in tabular and graphic form.
Figures: figures are numbered consecutively in Arabic numbers. References should be made in the text to each figure. Each figure should have a caption. The term "figure" is used also for graphs and photos. Symbols and abbreviations used in figures can be defined in the figure caption or note or within the figure itself. Please avoid the use of bold face or greater size for the characters. Symbols and abbreviations used in figures can be defined in the figure caption or note or within the figure itself.

• The figures must be submitted as .tif or .jpg files, with the following digital resolution:Color (saved as CMYK): minimum 300 dpi.
• Black and white/grays: minimum 600 dpi
• Lettering of figures must be clearly labelled.

Movies can be submitted and uploaded as "Supplementary Files" during the manuscript submission procedure. Dimension should not exceed 5 MB.
References: should be prepared strictly according to the instructions given below
The Journal follows the "author, year" style of citation. When a citation has one or two authors, cite the reference throughout using the name(s) and the date. When a citation has more than two authors, cite the reference throughout the text with et al. following the last name of the first author. When two or more references are included in a grouping within a sentence, they are arranged and separated by a semicolon. The first criterion is the year (former citations precede recent ones); multiple citations for a given year are further arranged alphabetically and multiple citations for the same initial letter are arranged as follows: first the citation with one author, secondly the citation with two authors, then the other (with et al.). When the same author has two references with different dates, cite them in chronological order, separating the dates with a comma; when the same author has two references with the same date, arrange the dates as a and b (also in the reference list) and separated by a comma. Journal titles mentioned in the reference list should be abbreviated according to the following websites (sequenced by relevance):

• ISI Journal Abbreviations Index (http://library.caltech.edu/reference/ abbreviations)
• Biological Journals and Abbreviations (http://home.ncifcrf.gov/research/bja)
• We suggest you to download the Endnote document at: IJA.ens.
• Example: (Foury, 1967, 1972; Burns et al., 1970; Allen et al., 1990; White et al., 1990a, 1990b; Basnizki and Zohary, 1994).

Citation should be made in the text to each reference. Citations are listed in strict alphabetical order by first author' last names. Use capital and lower case letters for authors' names. If all authors are identical for two or more citations, chronological order of publication should dictate the order of citations. When more than one paper in a given year is listed by authors whose names are in the same order in each paper, the papers are arranged in alphabetical order of the paper title. Use the following system to arrange your references:

• periodicals: 

1. Abdulhamed. Z. A., Abbasand, S. A., & Kosaj, K. I. (2022). Genetic and molecular variations using the molecular marker RAPD in barley yield. International. Journal of  Agricultural Statical Sciences, 18(1), 1930-1939.
2. Jerrentrup, A., Mueller, T., Glowalla, U., Herder, M., Henrichs, N., Neubauer, A., & Schaefer, J. R. (2018). Teaching medicine with the help of “Dr. House.” PLoS ONE, 13(3), Article e0193972.

• books: 

1. Hygum, E., & Pedersen, P. M. (Eds.). (2010). Early childhood education: Values and practices in Denmark. Hans Reitzels Forlag.
2. Brouwer, I. (1965) Report of the sub-committee on constants and factors. In: K.L. Blaxter (ed.) Energy metabolism. EAAP Publ. N. 11, Academic Press Ltd., London, UK, pp 441-3.

• proceedings: 

1. Rossi A, Bianchi, B. (1998) How writing the references. Proc. 4th World Congr. Appl. Livest. Prod., Armidale, Australia, 26:44-6. (Or 44, if one page) - Blanco P, Nigro B, 1970. Not numbered volumes. Page 127 (or pp 12-18) in Proc. 3rd Int. Conf. Cattle Dis., Philadelphia, PA, USA.

• thesis: 

1. Rossi P. (1999) Stima di parametri genetici nella razza Reggiana. Degree Diss., Università di Milano, Italy.

• material from a World Wide Web site: 

1. Food and Drug Administration (2001) Available from: http://www.fda.gov.

Authorship
All persons designated as authors should qualify for authorship according to the ICMJE criteria. Each author should have participated sufficiently in the work to take public responsibility for the content. Authorship credit should only be based on substantial contributions to i) conception and design, or analysis and interpretation of data; and to ii) drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content; and on iii) final approval of the version to be published. These three conditions must all be met. Participation solely in the acquisition of funding or the collection of data does not justify authorship. General supervision of the research group is not sufficient for authorship. Any part of an article critical to its main conclusions must be the responsibility of at least one author. Authors should provide a brief description of their individual contributions.

Changes in authorship

The journal does not respond to the authors' request to remove or add an author or change their order after submitting the manuscript.