Submissions

The Ambo University Journal of Science & Sustainable Development (JSSD) is an open access peer reviewed journal that provides rapid publication (bi-annually in January and August) of articles in all subject areas covering natural and Social Sciences, Agriculture, Technology and art etc.. The Journal welcomes the submission of manuscripts that meet the general criteria of significance and scientific excellence.

Submission of Manuscript:

The Journal of Science and Sustainable Development will only accept manuscripts submitted online through article submission portal. Electronic submission of manuscripts is strongly encouraged, provided that the text, tables, and figures are included in a single Microsoft Word file. The submitted manuscript should include all the authors and corresponding author’s full address. Corresponding author must declare that the manuscript submitted is on behalf of all authors and with their consent (See change to authorship). After successful submission of manuscript, acknowledgement shall be made automatically to the corresponding author and a manuscript number will be mailed shortly after.

Article Types:  Three types of manuscripts may be submitted:

Original Articles: These should describe new and carefully confirmed findings, and experimental procedures should be given in sufficient detail for others to verify the work. The length of a full paper should be the minimum required to describe and interpret the work clearly. The original articles submitted to JSSD should not have been previously published and not being considered for publication elsewhere. Papers should be in English and be prepared in A4 (8.27" X 11.69") page size, using standard fonts with font size of 12, with double-spacing, and margins of at least 1" (2.5cm) all around. Times New Roman fonts must be used and remain uniform throughout the text. Authors are required to strictly follow the Journal’s formatting guidelines in all sections of the manuscript. Original research articles should not exceed 8,000 words and may include up to six Tables and/or Figures, with a maximum of 45 references in the reference list.

Review papers: Submissions of reviews and perspectives covering topics of current interest are welcome and encouraged. Reviews should be concise and no longer than 10000 words with a maximum of 10 Figures/Tables and 100 references. The submitted review papers are also subjected to peer-review. It is expected that review articles would be written by authors with years of experience and have done substantial work on the subject area being reviewed.

Please note that systematic reviews should be submitted as Reviews paper, whereas meta-analysis should be submitted as Original article.

Short Communications: A Short Communication is suitable for recording the results of completed small investigations or giving details of new models or hypotheses, innovative methods, techniques or apparatus. The items of standard manuscript preparation as listed are applicable, though the style of main sections need not conform to that of full-length papers. Abstracts are limited to between 100 and 150 words, results and discussion should be combined into a single section. Short Communications are limited to a maximum of two figures and one table, and to a total of 3000 words without including Figures and Tables. It should be noted that short communication may not be used for preliminary publications of the data; therefore, the same material cannot be published elsewhere as an original paper after it has been published in JSSD.

Review Process

All submitted manuscripts are initially screened by the Editorial Board to assess their alignment with the journal’s scope, compliance with formatting requirements, overall quality, similarity index, and scientific merit. Articles that pass the initial screening will be evaluated by qualified reviewers selected from the journal’s database or invited externally by the Editorial Board.Authors cannot nominate reviewers. Only reviewers randomly selected from our database or external reviewers with specialization in the subject area will be contacted to evaluate the manuscript. The process will be double blind review. Decisions will be made as rapidly as possible based on reviewer’s recommendation, editorial board decision.  The Journal strives to return reviewers’ comments to authors as soon as possible. The editorial board will re-review manuscripts that are accepted pending revision. It is the goal of the JSSD to publish manuscripts shortly after submission.

Manuscript preparation

Title page

All portions of the manuscript must be typed double-spaced and page numbering starts from the title page. The Title should be short and brief phrase describing the contents of the paper. Abbreviations are not permitted in the title, except for those that are widely recognized and commonly accepted. The Title Page should include the authors’ full names and affiliations, the name of the corresponding author along with current phone, fax and E-mail information.

Abstract

The Abstract should be informative and completely self-explanatory, briefly present the topic, state the scope of the experiments, indicate significant data, and point out major findings and conclusions. The abstract should be 250 to 300 words in length. Complete sentences, active verbs, and the third person written in past tense should be used. Standard nomenclature should be used and abbreviations should be avoided. No literature should be cited. Following the abstract, about 3 to 5 key words that will provide indexing references should be listed. A list of non-standard Abbreviations should be added only when the full term is very long and used often. Each abbreviation should be spelt out and introduced in parentheses the first time it is used in the text. Only recommended SI units should be used. Standard abbreviations (such as ATP and DNA) need not be defined.

Introduction

The Introduction should provide a clear statement of the problem, the relevant literature on the subject, and the proposed approach or solution. It should be understandable to colleagues from a broad range of scientific disciplines.

Materials and Methods

Materials and Methods should be complete enough based on laid down standard procedures for science, arts, and social research that allow trials/surveys/experiments to be reproduced. Detailed information should be provided on design, sampling population/techniques and data analysis procedure. However, only truly new procedures should be described in detail; previously published procedures should be cited, and important modifications of published procedures should be mentioned briefly. Capitalize trade names and include the manufacturer’s name and address. Subheadings should be used. Methods in general use need not be described in detail.

Results

Results should be presented with clarity and precision. The results should be written in the past tense when describing findings in the author(s)’ experiments. Previously published findings should be written in the present tense. Results should be explained, but largely without referring to the literature. Discussion, speculation and detailed interpretation of data should not be included in the results but should be put into the discussion section.

Discussion

The Discussion should interpret the findings in view of the results obtained in this and in past studies on this topic. State the conclusions in a few sentences at the end of the paper. The Results and Discussion sections can include subheadings, and when appropriate, both sections can be combined.

Conclusion

The conclusion section of a manuscript submitted to JSSD should be clear, concise, and directly linked to the study objectives and findings. A conclusion should leave readers with a clear understanding of the study’s importance, reliability, and contribution to sustainable development research. If recommendations are included, they should be evidence-based and derived directly from the study findings. Please avoid repeating detailed data, statistics, or discussions already presented in the results and discussion section.

Acknowledgments

In the articles to be submitted to JSSD, the authors should acknowledge individuals, organizations, or institutions that contributed to the research or manuscript but do not meet the criteria for authorship. This include acknowledgements of people, grants, funds, etc. should be as brief as possible.

Conflict of Interest

All manuscripts submitted to JSSD must include a Conflict of Interest statement. This statement should be placed after the Conclusion section and before the References.

Funding Information

All manuscripts submitted to JSSD must include a Funding Information statement. The Funding Information section should clearly disclose all financial support received for the research and publication of the manuscript.

Authors contributions

All manuscripts submitted to JSSD must include an Authors’ Contributions section. The purpose of this section is to clearly describe the specific contributions of each author to ensure transparency and accountability.

Table and Figure

Legends for figures and tables should be presented in numerical order. Use Arabic numerals to number figures and tables, and uppercase letters to label their parts (e.g., Figure 1). Each legend should start with a title and provide enough detail for the figure or table to be understood independently of the manuscript text. Do not repeat information from the legends within the main text. Graphics should be prepared using applications capable of generating high resolution GIF, TIFF, JPEG or PowerPoint before pasting in the Microsoft Word manuscript file. Tables should be prepared in Microsoft Word.  Tables, Figures and their legends are preferably to be embedded in the text on appropriate places.

References:

In the text, a reference identified by means of an author‘s name should be followed by the date of the reference in parentheses. For articles with two authors, cite both authors’ last names connected by “and” followed by comma and the year of publication. When there are more than two authors, only the first author‘s name should be mentioned, followed by ’et al‘. In the event that an author cited has two or more works published during the same year, the reference, both in the text and in the reference list, should be identified by a lower case letter ’a‘ and ’b‘ after the date to distinguish the works.

Examples:

• Abayomi (2000), Agindotan et al. (2003), (Kelebeni, 1983), (Kumasi et al., 2001), (Usman and Smith, 1992), (Chege, 1998; Chukwura, 1987a,b; Tijani, 1993,1995)

References should be listed at the end of the paper in alphabetical order. Articles in preparation or articles submitted for publication, unpublished observations, personal communications, etc. should not be included in the reference list but should only be mentioned in the article text (e.g., A. Kingori, University of Nairobi, Kenya, personal communication). Journal names are abbreviated according to American Psychological Association (APA). Authors are entirely responsible for ensuring the accuracy of their references and must carefully follow the APA referencing style as shown below:

Journal articles

• Chikere, C. B., Omoni, V. T. & Chikere, B. O. (2008). Distribution of potential nosocomial pathogens in a hospital environment. African Journal of Biotechnology, 7, 3535-3539.
• Moran, G. J., Amii, R. N., Abrahamian, F. M. & Talan, D. A. (2005). Methicillinresistant Staphylococcus aureus in community-acquired skin infections. Emerg. Infectious Diseases, 11, 928-930.
• Pitout, J. D. D., Church, D. L., Gregson, D. B., Chow, B. L., McCracken, M., Mulvey, M. & Laupland, K. B.  (2007). Molecular epidemiology of CTXM-producing Escherichia   coli in the Calgary Health Region: emergence of CTX-M-15-producing isolates. Antimicrobial Agents for Chemotherapy, 51, 1281-1286.

Books

• Pelczar, J. R., Harley, J. P. & Klein, D. A. (1993). Microbiology: Concepts and Applications. McGraw-Hill Inc., New York, USA.
• Creswell, J. W., & Poth, C. N. (2018). Qualitative inquiry and research design: Choosing among five approaches (4^th ed.). Sage Publications, USA.

Edited Book chapters

• Medley, D. M. (1983). Teacher effectiveness. In H. E. Mitzel (Ed.), Encyclopedia of educational research (pp. 1894-1903). New York: The Free Press, USA.
• Davis, P. K. & Rehfeldt, R. A. (2007). Functional skills training for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. In J. K. Luiselli, J. A. Matson & F. R. Volkmar (Eds.), Handbook of intellectual and developmental disabilities (pp. 581–599), Springer.

Thesis/ Dissertations

• Gezahegn, Y. B. (2007). Barriers to teaching and learning mathematics in grade four. Masters Thesis, University of Oslo, Norway.
• Weldeab, C. T. (2006). Family, school, and community: Challenges in raising and educating children with intellectual disability: A case study among parents, teachers, and social workers in Ethiopia. Doctoral dissertation, University of Oslo, Norway.

Proofs and Reprints:

Electronic proofs will be sent (e-mail attachment) to the corresponding author as a portable document format (PDF) file.  Page proofs are considered to be the final version of the manuscript. With the exception of typographical or minor clerical errors, no major changes will be allowed on the manuscript at proof stage.  Because Ambo University JSSD will be published freely online to attract a wide audience, authors will have free electronic access to the full text (in PDF) of the article. Authors can freely download the PDF file from which they can print copies of their articles.

Change to authorship:

Before an accepted manuscript is published, requests to add or remove an author, or to rearrange the author names, must be sent to the Editor in Chief from the corresponding author of the accepted manuscript and must include: (a) why the name should be added or removed, or the authors names rearranged and (b) written confirmation from all authors showing that they agree with the addition, removal or rearrangement. In the case of addition or removal of an author; this includes confirmation from the author being added or removed. Requests that are not sent by the corresponding author will be forwarded by the Editor in Chief to the corresponding author, who must follow the procedure as described above. The publication of such manuscript on the journal issue shall be suspended until authorship has been agreed.

Fees and Charges:

Authors are not required to pay any handling or processing fee to get their article processed.