Aquaculture
Guide for Authors
Types of paper
Research Papers should report the results of original research. The material should not have been previously published elsewhere. Articles are expected to contribute new information (e.g. novel methods of analysis with added new insights and impacts) to the knowledge base in the field, not just to confirm previously published work.
Review Articles can cover either narrow disciplinary subjects or broad issues requiring interdisciplinary discussion. They should provide objective critical evaluation of a defined subject. Reviews should not consist solely of a summary of published data. Evaluation of the quality of existing data, the status of knowledge, and the research required to advance knowledge of the subject are essential.
Short Communications are used to communicate results which represent a major breakthrough or startling new discovery and which should therefore be published quickly. They should not be used for preliminary results. Papers must contain sufficient data to establish that the research has achieved reliable and significant results.
Technical Papers should present new methods and procedures for either research methodology or culture-related techniques.
The Letters to the Editor section is intended to provide a forum for discussion of aquacultural science emanating from material published in the journal.
Contact details for submission
Papers for consideration should be submitted via the electronic submission system mentioned below to the appropriate Section Editor:
Nutrition:
Vertebrate Nutrition: D.M. Gatlin
Invertebrate Nutrition: M.T. Viana
Larval Nutrition: Q. Ai
The Nutrition Section welcomes high quality research papers presenting novel data as well as original reviews on various aspects of aquatic animal nutrition relevant to aquaculture. Manuscripts addressing the following areas of investigation are encouraged:
1) determination of dietary and metabolic requirements for various nutrients by representative aquatic species. Studies may include environmental/stress effects on animal's physiological responses and requirements at different developmental stages;
2) evaluation of novel or established feedstuffs as well as feed processing and manufacturing procedures with digestibility and growth trials. Such studies should provide comprehensive specifications of the process or evaluated ingredients including nutrients, potential anti-nutrients, and contaminants;
3) comparison of nutrient bioavailability from various ingredients or product forms as well as metabolic kinetics of nutrients, food borne anti-nutrients or toxins;
4) identification of key components in natural diets that influence attractability, palatability, metabolism, growth reproduction and/or immunity of cultured organisms;
5) optimization of diet formulations and feeding practices;
6) characterization of the actions of hormones, cytokines and/or components in intracellular signaling pathway(s) that influence nutrient and/or energy utilization.
7) evaluation of diet supplementation strategies to influence animal performance, metabolism, health and/or flesh quality.
8) evaluation of nutritional strategies oriented to environment-friendly aquaculture and high-quality products.
Manuscripts concerning other areas of nutrition using novel or advanced methods are also welcome. Please note that in regard to various diet additives such as probiotics, prebiotics, herbal extracts, etc., a very large number of papers have already been published. Therefore, Aquaculture will not continue to accept manuscripts that present initial and preliminary investigations of such additives. Manuscripts addressing these and other feed additives will be accepted for review only if they are of the highest scientific quality and they represent a significant advance in our knowledge of the mechanisms involved in their metabolism. Manuscripts may also be considered if they present clinical efficacy data generated in large-scale trials and economic cost-benefit analysis of these applications.
Aquaculture Production Science:
Jian Qin
The Aquaculture Production Science (PS) is dedicated to research on improvements and innovations in aquatic food production.
This section supports worldwide dissemination of the results of innovative, globally important, scientific research on production methods for aquatic foods from fish, crustaceans, mollusks, amphibians, and all types of aquatic plants. Contributions are encouraged in the following areas: 1) Improvement of production systems that results in greater efficiencies of resource usage and sustainability of aquaculture; 2) Effective applications of technologies and methods of aquaculture production for improved stocking regimes; 3) The use of new species and species assemblages; and, 4) Investigations to minimize aquaculture wastes and improve water quality, including technologies for nutrient recycling in aquaculture ecosystems, and potential synergy of aquaculture and other food production systems using methods such as polyculture and integrated aquaculture. Aspects of seafood processing and technology will not be considered in this section although aquaculture techniques that may influence the nutritional value of aq
Physiology:
Vertebrate Physiology: A. Takemura
Invertebrate Physiology: W.A. O'Connor
The Physiology Section welcomes high quality papers that present either novel research data or original reviews. The content must be relevant to solving aquaculture problems on all aspects of the physiology of cultured aquatic animals and plants.
Submitted manuscripts must have a valid hypothesis or objective, clearly state the relevance to aquaculture, have proper experimental design with appropriate controls and utilize appropriate statistical analysis. Mention of trade names is limited to the main text.
Relevant physiological topics include, but are not limited to:
Reproductive and endocrine physiology, including control of development and sex differentiation, induced ovulation and spermiation, gamete quality, storage and cryopreservation, physiology of gynogenetic, and triploid and transgenic organisms
Cardiorespiratory, muscle and exercise physiology
Osmoregulatory physiology
Digestive physiology, including endocrine and environmental regulation of growth
Larval physiology and ontogeny, including metamorphosis, smolting and molting
Performance under variable culture conditions, including temperature, water quality, rearing density, and stress and disease physiology
Physiology of harvest and handling techniques
Genetics:
J.A.H. Benzie
The Genetics Section welcomes high-quality research papers presenting novel data, as well as critical reviews, on various aspects of selective breeding, genetics and genomics. Submitted manuscripts must have a valid hypothesis or objective, clearly state the relevance to aquaculture, have proper experimental design with appropriate sample size and controls and utilize appropriate statistical analysis.
Relevant genetics topics include, but are not limited to:
Breeding programs using classic selection procedures, markers or combining marker assisted selection with classic selection
Applications of crossbreeding and interspecific hybridization
Evaluation of commercially important phenotypes among cultured strains, populations or stocks
Applications of biotechnology and genetic manipulation methods
Development of linkage maps, identification of QTL or association of commercially important traits with specific gene(s). Where appropriate, linkage maps should include co-dominant markers, such as microsatellite DNA and SNP markers, to enable application to other populations and facilitate comparative mapping.
Aquaculture will NOT accept manuscripts dealing with the application of well-described techniques to yet another species, unless the application solves a specific biological problem important to aquaculture production; or manuscripts dealing with gene cloning, characterizing of microsatellites, species identification using molecular markers, EST papers with small collections, or mapping papers with a small number of markers, unless the papers also deal with solving a biological problem that is relevant to aquaculture production.
Aquaculture will not accept manuscripts focusing mainly on population genetics studies that are based on RAPD and AFLP markers, since the dominance and multilocus nature of the fingerprints are not suitable for making inferences about population genetic diversity and structure.
Sustainability and Society:
D.C. Little
The Sustainability and Society section of the journal Aquaculture invites articles at the interface of natural and social sciences that address the broader roles of aquaculture in global food security and trade.
Aims and scope of the Sustainability and Society section are the: global dissemination of interdisciplinary knowledge regarding the management of aquatic resources and resulting impacts on people. Interconnections with other sectors of food production; resource management and implications for societal impact. Going beyond a narrow techno-centric focus, towards more holistic analyses of aquaculture within well-defined contexts. Enquiry based on understanding trajectories of change amid the global challenges of climate change and food security. Mixed methods and approaches that incorporate and integrate both social and natural sciences. Relevance for the diverse range of policy makers, practitioners and other stakeholders involved. Articles that take a value chain approach, rather than being wholly production orientated, are encouraged.
Immunology
J. Galindo-Villegas
The Immunology section aims to attract high-quality manuscripts dealing with the understanding and characterization of the innate and adaptive immune mechanisms and defense systems, from molecules and cells to tissues impacting the variated aquatic organisms generated through controlled culture means. Functional studies are preferred over those merely descriptive and without a clear scope among aquacultured organisms. Developments and new notions in the understanding of host-microbe interactions, immunostimulation, vaccination, trained immunity, immune-tolerance, etc. determined via using state-of-the-art techniques like (meta)genomics, transcriptomics, metabolomics or proteomics on specific target species, or explicitly demonstrated in lower taxa model-organisms with a clear further application in aquaculture are highly encouraged.
Disease
Microbial interaction: P. Bossier
Parasites and Parasite Control: A. Shinn
Viral interactions: F. Kibenge
The Disease sections welcomes critical reviews and high quality articles containing novel data on all aspects concerning diseases of farmed aquatic species. The aims of the section are: description of new and emerging diseases including characterization of the causal agent(s), development in the understanding of fish pathogens for example including new methods of growth where this has been a problem for fastidious organisms, pathogenicity and epizootiology, developments in the diagnosis of disease going beyond the use of standard well used methods, and methods of disease control, notably new developments in vaccines, immunostimulants, dietary supplements, medicinal plant products, probiotics, prebiotics and genetically-disease resistant stock. Relevance to aquaculture must be demonstrated. Articles, which adapt well known methods without further refinement of those methods, are unlikely to be accepted.
Submission Checklist
You can use this list to carry out a final check of your submission before you send it to the journal for review. Please check the relevant section in this Guide for Authors for more details.
Ensure that the following items are present:
One author has been designated as the corresponding author with contact details:
• E-mail address
• Full postal address
All necessary files have been uploaded:
Manuscript:
• Include keywords
• All figures (include relevant captions)
• All tables (including titles, description, footnotes)
• Ensure all figure and table citations in the text match the files provided
• Indicate clearly if color should be used for any figures in print
Graphical Abstracts / Highlights files (where applicable)
Supplemental files (where applicable)
Further considerations
• Manuscript has been 'spell checked' and 'grammar checked'
• All references mentioned in the Reference List are cited in the text, and vice versa
• Permission has been obtained for use of copyrighted material from other sources (including the Internet)
• Relevant declarations of interest have been made
• Journal policies detailed in this guide have been reviewed
• Referee suggestions and contact details provided, based on journal requirements
For further information, visit our Support Center.
In order to facilitate the review process, please make sure your submission is prepared with:
• Double line spacing
• Continuously numbered lines throughout the manuscript
• Numbered pages
Author of papers to “Aquaculture” are requested to verify their experimental design. Results should always include biological replicates. These could be obtained by performing an experiment multiple times within the same time window (demonstrating repeatability) or by performing an experiment multiple times in different time windows (demonstrating reproducibility). In a typical experiment, a biological replicate in aquaculture is a “tank”. Individuals that were kept during the experiment in one single tank are not independent from each other and can hence not be considered as a biological replicate. Authors are also requested to consult “Aquaculture Volume 437, 1 Pages 344-350” for further support on statistical processing of data.
Ethics in publishing
Please see our information on Ethics in publishing.
Studies in humans and animals
If the work involves the use of human subjects, the author should ensure that the work described has been carried out in accordance with The Code of Ethics of the World Medical Association (Declaration of Helsinki) for experiments involving humans. The manuscript should be in line with the Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals and aim for the inclusion of representative human populations (sex, age and ethnicity) as per those recommendations. The terms sex and gender should be used correctly.
Authors should include a statement in the manuscript that informed consent was obtained for experimentation with human subjects. The privacy rights of human subjects must always be observed.
All animal experiments should comply with the ARRIVE guidelines and should be carried out in accordance with the U.K. Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act, 1986 and associated guidelines, EU Directive 2010/63/EU for animal experiments, or the National Institutes of Health guide for the care and use of Laboratory animals (NIH Publications No. 8023, revised 1978) and the authors should clearly indicate in the manuscript that such guidelines have been followed. The sex of animals must be indicated, and where appropriate, the influence (or association) of sex on the results of the study.
Declaration of competing interest
All authors must disclose any financial and personal relationships with other people or organizations that could inappropriately influence (bias) their work. Examples of potential conflicts of interest include employment, consultancies, stock ownership, honoraria, paid expert testimony, patent applications/registrations, and grants or other funding. Authors should create a declaration of competing interest statement using this tool and upload to the submission system at the Attach Files step. Note: Please do not convert the .docx template to another file type. Author signatures are not required.
Submission declaration
Submission of an article implies that the work described has not been published previously (except in the form of an abstract, a published lecture or academic thesis, see 'Multiple, redundant or concurrent publication' for more information), that it is not under consideration for publication elsewhere, that its publication is approved by all authors and tacitly or explicitly by the responsible authorities where the work was carried out, and that, if accepted, it will not be published elsewhere in the same form, in English or in any other language, including electronically without the written consent of the copyright-holder.
Submission declaration and verification
Submission of an article implies that the work described has not been published previously (except in the form of an abstract or as part of a published lecture or academic thesis or as an electronic preprint, see https://www.elsevier.com/postingpolicy), that it is not under consideration for publication elsewhere, that its publication is approved by all authors and tacitly or explicitly by the responsible authorities where the work was carried out, and that, if accepted, it will not be published elsewhere in the same form, in English or in any other language, including electronically without the written consent of the copyright-holder. To verify originality, your article may be checked by the originality detection service CrossCheck https://www.elsevier.com/editors/plagdetect.
If the manuscript to be submitted was previously rejected by Aquaculture or another journal, it is necessary to specify what substantive new work and/or revisions have been included to elevate the manuscript’s quality for consideration by Aquaculture.
Preprints
Please note that preprints can be shared anywhere at any time, in line with Elsevier's sharing policy. Sharing your preprints e.g. on a preprint server will not count as prior publication (see 'Multiple, redundant or concurrent publication' for more information).
Use of inclusive language
Inclusive language acknowledges diversity, conveys respect to all people, is sensitive to differences, and promotes equal opportunities. Content should make no assumptions about the beliefs or commitments of any reader; contain nothing which might imply that one individual is superior to another on the grounds of age, gender, race, ethnicity, culture, sexual orientation, disability or health condition; and use inclusive language throughout. Authors should ensure that writing is free from bias, stereotypes, slang, reference to dominant culture and/or cultural assumptions. We advise to seek gender neutrality by using plural nouns ("clinicians, patients/clients") as default/wherever possible to avoid using "he, she," or "he/she." We recommend avoiding the use of descriptors that refer to personal attributes such as age, gender, race, ethnicity, culture, sexual orientation, disability or health condition unless they are relevant and valid. These guidelines are meant as a point of reference to help identify appropriate language but are by no means exhaustive or definitive.
Author contributions
For transparency, we encourage authors to submit an author statement file outlining their individual contributions to the paper using the relevant CRediT roles: Conceptualization; Data curation; Formal analysis; Funding acquisition; Investigation; Methodology; Project administration; Resources; Software; Supervision; Validation; Visualization; Roles/Writing - original draft; Writing - review & editing. Authorship statements should be formatted with the names of authors first and CRediT role(s) following. More details and an example
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https://www.elsevier.com/journals/aquaculture/0044-8486/guide-for-authors
