Guidelines for Submitting Papers
to the Journal of the
Professional Association for Cactus Development
Table of Contents, Journal Editors, Acknowledgements
The Professional Association for Cactus Development (PACD) recognizes the valuable expertise of all its members—plant scientists, medical scientists, growers, ranchers, marketers, and chefs. Our goal is to foster meaningful dialogue among all aspects of development of the cactus industry. It is important for the growers to understand the needs of the buyers, for the scientists to understand the needs of the growers, and for the scientists to understand the relevance of market-driven economies in their research. The input of a CEO of a company processing and marketing cactus products is as valuable as that of a scientist. As the views of all these sectors are absolutely vital to the growth of the cactus industry, it is essential for our Journal to actively seek and publish the perspectives of both nonscientists and scientists involved with cactus.
Because the normal communication mode of the business, ranching, and culinary sectors is not that of a scientific paper and because both nonscientific and scientific inputs are very valuable to the body of knowledge for cactus, the Journal will strive to include many types of knowledge, each in the format traditional to its individual professional discipline.
The editors will vigorously seek written contributions for inclusion in our Journal from growers, marketers, legislators, and those involved in public policy. The editorial board will also review papers outside the scientific format for grammatical clarity and accuracy. The editorial board may request input from ranchers, chefs, and marketing specialists to verify the accuracy of nonscientific submissions.
The traditional mode of communication in science has been a refereed journal article with an introduction that briefly reviews the scientific literature, a materials and methods section, a results section, and a discussion section. Clearly, this mode of communication is essential to communication among scientists. Scientific papers will be peer reviewed in the normal process by a scientific editorial board using the traditional scientific review process.
The editors acknowledge that both field and laboratory data are vital to the development of our knowledge base for cactus. The editors also acknowledge the difficulty in field experiments with large perennial plants that may require many years to produce data. Cost factors in maintaining an adequate number of replications over long periods with wide spacings may be confounded with the necessity to conduct several types of experiments simultaneously. The editors will be sympathetic to these needs, and it will be the policy of our Journal to be as helpful as possible to extract precious data from all experiments.
To maintain some consistency and standards in published papers, the editors request adherence to the format and style guidelines on the next page.
As a general rule, the following requirements apply:
(1) There are no page charges. At least one author must be a member of the PACD.
(2) A hardcopy and an electronic copy in a standard format, such as WordPerfectÔ, will be required.
(3) Figures shall be laser-quality reproductions or original color or black and white photographs. The Journal will publish the reproductions only in black and white.
(4) In-text citations will be, for example, (Nobel 1996) or Nobel (1996) reported that..., as applicable. The style of references will be the author, date convention, e.g., Nobel, P. 1996. Effects of cold hardiness on Opuntia ficus-indica. Journal of Plant Physiology 30:234-256.
(5) All monetary values will be reported in U.S. dollars. Local currency may be reported parenthetically.
(6) Scientific papers will use metric units. Marketing and/or ranching data may be in English units.
(7) Manuscripts may be in Spanish, but an English abstract and English titles to tables and figures will be required in addition to Spanish table and figure legends.
(8) The Journal of the PACD will be published once per year, appearing in March.
(9) The deadline for manuscripts for the Journal will be 1 October of each year.
(10) Papers not in traditional scientific format will be welcomed and reviewed on a case by case basis. Every effort will be made to help the authors with their manuscripts.
In summary, we, the first editors of the Journal of the Professional Association for Cactus Development, are very excited to be a part of the excellent editorial committee and to work together to create the synergism between scientists, growers, legislators, and business people so vital to the development of this industry to serve the people of arid lands.