INSTRUCTIONS FOR AUTHORS

The LGU Journal of Life Sciences (LGULS) is an open access quarterly journal that provides rapid of papers in area of life sciences. The authors are strongly encouraged to submit manuscripts in LGUJLS. Manuscript should be typed on MS Word and blind file without author's name and their affiliation. Each manuscript should be accompanied by a statement that it has neither been published nor been submitted simultaneously for publication elsewhere. Authors are responsible for obtaining permission to reproduce copyrighted material from other sources. Authors are also responsible to ensure that the article contains no plagiarism that will be checked by TURNITIN. Authors retain the copyright to their work while granting LGUJLS the right to publish the article under a specified license. There is a publishing fee of 10,000 PKR upon acceptance of the manuscript for authors starting from January 2023. The journal does not have a waiver policy for the publication fee. The Journal welcomes the submission of manuscripts that meet the general criteria of significance and scientific excellence.

ARTICLE TYPES

Three types of manuscripts may be submitted:

REGULAR 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.

SHORT COMMUNICATIONS:

A Short Communication is suitable for recording the results of complete small investigations or giving details of new models or hypotheses, gene isolation and identification, innovative methods, techniques or apparatus. The style of main sections need not conform to that of full-length papers. Short communications are 2 to 4 printed pages (about 6 to 12 manuscript pages) in length.

MINI-REVIEW

Submissions of mini-reviews and perspectives covering topics of current interest are welcome and encouraged. Mini-reviews should be concise and no longer than 4-6 printed pages (about 12 to 18 manuscript pages). Mini-reviews are also peer-reviewed.

REVIEW PROCESS

All manuscripts are reviewed by an editor and members of the Editorial Board or qualified outside reviewers. Authors cannot nominate reviewers. Only reviewers randomly selected from our database with specialization in the subject area will be contacted to evaluate the manuscripts. The process will be blind review.

Decisions will be made as rapidly as possible, and the journal strives to return reviewers’ comments to authors promptly. The editorial board will re-review manuscripts that are accepted pending revision. It is the goal of LGULS to publish manuscripts shortly after submission.

REGULAR ARTICLES

All portions of the manuscript must be typed double-spaced and all pages numbered starting from the title page.

The Title should be a brief phrase describing the contents of the paper. The Title Page should include the authors' full names and affiliations, the name of the corresponding author along with phone, fax and E- mail information. Present addresses of authors should appear as a footnote.

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 100 to 200 words in length.  Complete sentences, active verbs, and the third person should be used, and the abstract should be written in the past tense. Standard nomenclature should be used and abbreviations should be avoided. No literature should be cited.

Following the abstract, about 5 to 7 key words that will provide indexing references to should be listed.

A list of non-standard Abbreviations should be added. In general, non-standard abbreviations should be used only when the full term is very long and used often. Each abbreviation should be spelled out and introduced in parentheses the first time it is used in the text. Only recommended SI units should be used. Authors should use the solidus presentation (mg/ml). Standard abbreviations (such as ATP and DNA) need not be defined.

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 should be complete enough to allow experiments to be reproduced. 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 should be presented with clarity and precision. The results should be written in the past tense when describing findings in the authors' 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 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.

The ACKNOWLEDGMENTS of people, grants, funds, etc should be brief.

TABLES should be kept to a minimum and be designed to be as simple as possible. Tables are to be typed double- spaced throughout, including headings and footnotes. Tables should be self-explanatory without reference to the text. The details of the methods used in the experiments should preferably be described in the legend instead of in the text. The same data should not be presented in both table and graph form or repeated in the text.

FIGURE LEGENDS should be typed in numerical order and graphics should be prepared using applications capable of generating high resolution GIF, TIFF, JPEG or Power point before pasting in the Microsoft Word manuscript file. Use Arabic numerals to designate figures and upper case letters for their parts (Fig 1). Begin each legend with a title and include  sufficient description so that the figure is understandable without reading  the  text  of  the  manuscript.  Information given in legends should not be repeated in the text.

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. 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 had 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 like ’a‘ and ’b‘ after the date to distinguish the works.

Examples:

Smith (2000), Blake et al. (2003), (Kelebeni, 1983), (Chandra and Singh, 1992), (Chege, 1986; Steddy, 1987a, b; Gold, 1993,1995), (Kumasi et al., 2001)

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 Chemical Abstracts. Authors are fully responsible for the accuracy of the references.

Examples:

Diaz E, Prieto MA (2000). Bacterial promoters triggering biodegradation of aromatic pollutants. Curr. Opin. Biotech. 11: 467-475.

Dorn E, Knackmuss HJ (1978). Chemical structure and biodegradability of halogenated aromatic compounds.  Two catechol 1, 2 dioxygenases from  a 3-chlorobenzoate-grown Pseudomonad. Biochem. J. 174:  73-84.

Pitter   P,   Chudoba   J   (1990). Biodegradability of Organic Substances in the Aquatic Environment. CRC press, Boca Raton, Florida, USA.

SHORT COMMUNICATIONS

Short Communications are limited to a maximum of two figures and one table. They should present a complete study that is more limited in scope than is found in full-length papers.  The items of manuscript preparation listed above apply to Short Communications with the following differences:

• Abstracts are limited to 100 words; (2) instead of a separate Materials and Methods section, experimental procedures may be incorporated into Figure Legends and Table footnotes; (3) Results and Discussion should be combined into a single

COPYRIGHT:

All work published by LGUJLS is protected by international copyright laws. All articles published in LGUJLS are open-access articles published and distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License which allows reproduction, distribution, derives, both commercial and non-commercial use, provided the original work is cited and authors and publisher are properly identified. Authors retain the copyright to their work while granting LGUJLS the right to publish the article under a specified license.