- Printed Journal
- Indexed Journal
- Refereed Journal
- Peer Reviewed Journal
P-ISSN: 2664-844X
E-ISSN: 2664-8458
Choose an agriculture journal by checking five things: whether your subject sits inside its scope, whether the databases it claims can be verified, whether the review process is described, whether every article gets a DOI, and what the charges are and when they fall due. All five are checkable in under an hour, and doing it before you finish writing saves reformatting later.
Most authors choose a journal at the end, when the paper is written and they want it gone. Then they wait three months for a rejection that was predictable on day one.
The commonest reason an agriculture journal paper is rejected without ever reaching a reviewer is that it does not fit. Editors are not being difficult — they are protecting reviewers’ time.
The check takes fifteen minutes: read the aim and scope, then open the two most recent issues and read the titles. Not the abstracts. If none of them sits near your subject, you have your answer.
A paper rejected on scope costs three months and teaches you nothing. It is the only rejection entirely preventable before you submit.
| # | Check | How | Time |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Scope | Aim and scope page, plus titles from two recent issues | 15 min |
| 2 | Indexing | Open each claimed database and search by name or ISSN | 15 min |
| 3 | Review process | Find the page that describes it. No page is itself an answer | 5 min |
| 4 | DOIs | Open a recent article, find the DOI, test that it resolves | 2 min |
| 5 | Charges | The amount and the stage at which it applies | 5 min |
At this agriculture journal all five are on the site: indexing with verification links, the peer review and publication policy, a Crossref DOI on every article, and charges of 2,500 INR (Indian authors) or 55 USD (international) payable only after acceptance, with no submission fee.
A row of database logos on a homepage is an image file. It proves nothing, and it costs nothing to put there.
Go to the database and search for the journal by name or by ISSN. Two failures show up: databases the journal was never in, and databases that dropped it while the logo stayed. The second one catches even careful authors, because nothing on the page tells you.
This is why our Indexing Information page gives the direct link for each entry rather than a badge. If a journal will not give you links, do the searches yourself — fifteen minutes for the whole list.
Our guide on open access versus subscription publishing explains why the timing tells you more than the amount.
One of these alone can have an innocent explanation. Three together is a pattern.
Once you have a shortlist, check your paper matches a category the journal publishes. This journal takes original research articles, review articles (not more than 4,500 words), case reports (up to 2,000 words, 10 references, 6 authors), short communications and letters to the editor (up to 800 words).
Choose the category before you write. It sets your length, your structure and sometimes your reference count, and discovering the limit afterwards means cutting at the worst possible moment.
A question worth asking that authors rarely do: who do you want to read this? For a great deal of agricultural research the useful readers are not other academics. They are extension officers, state agriculture departments, cooperatives, agri-input advisers, NGOs and farmers’ organisations — people who will act on the result rather than cite it.
Almost none of them hold journal subscriptions. If your work is meant to change what happens in a field, publishing it behind a paywall reaches the people studying the problem and misses the people solving it.
| Stage | Who controls it | Realistic |
|---|---|---|
| Editorial check | The editor | Days |
| Peer review | Two unpaid reviewers | Weeks |
| Your revision | You | One week here |
| Second review | The same reviewers | Days to weeks |
| Production and proofs | The publisher | Days |
Only one row is yours, and in real papers it is the row that most often runs longest — authors set reviewer comments aside for a month. A journal advertising a guaranteed number of days before seeing your manuscript is promising something it cannot control either.
Submitting well outside your paper’s reach, being rejected, and working down a ladder is common and expensive. Each cycle costs two to four months. Three cycles is a year in which nobody read the work.
One reach attempt is defensible if the paper genuinely might belong there. Three in sequence usually means the first assessment was wrong and never revisited.
The opposite failure is picking whichever agriculture journal answers fastest. Speed is not a quality, and a venue that publishes anything gives your work no signal. Some institutions also decline to count publications from journals they cannot verify.
Whichever journal you settle on, read its author instructions from beginning to end once — not just the section you think you need. That page fixes your file format, page limit, abstract limit, keyword count, reference style, figure resolution and submission checklist.
Here that is the Instructions to Author page: MS Word, Times New Roman 12, single line spacing, one inch margins, not more than 15 pages, abstract not more than 300 words, 3 to 6 keywords, Vancouver references, figures at 75 or 155 mm and 300 dpi. Twenty minutes, and every one of those decisions is made before you write rather than after.
One habit closes most of the gap: pick the agriculture journal before you finish the paper, not after. Every formatting decision, every length limit and the reference style all follow from that choice, and making them once is far less work than making them twice.
Read the aim and scope, then read the titles in the two most recent issues. If nothing there resembles your subject, the answer is no, however good the work is. Scope mismatch is the commonest desk rejection and the cheapest to avoid.
No. Simultaneous submission is prohibited, and your cover letter has to state that the work is not under consideration elsewhere. Being found out costs far more than the weeks you save.
Not necessarily. A journal whose scope only half fits your work will reject it, and a year later you have nothing published. Fit and readership matter more than the number for most papers.
About an hour, before you finish writing. That hour fixes your format, your length limit and your reference style, so doing it afterwards means reformatting.
Yes. A short presubmission enquiry with your title and abstract is normal and saves everyone time. Keep it to a paragraph.
Read the note carefully — editors often name a better-suited venue. Then check the next journal properly, because the same mistake twice costs months.
Before you settle on a journal, read these together:
Created by Rahul Jha • 09 Aug 2026
P-ISSN: 2664-844X
E-ISSN: 2664-8458
International Journal of Agriculture and Food Science