Submissions

Article Processing Charges (APC) - See details here.

Formatting

Manuscripts require formatting in journal's style at the time of submission. 

Provide names of all authors, their affiliations, email ids, ORCID ID, etc at the time of submission (as indicated in the PST template files).

Use Line Numbering as given in the above article template.

Manuscripts of all categories are to be submitted online.

International System of Units
Authors are requested to use the information given at https://www.nist.gov/pml/owm/metric-si/si-units
Details of SI units for Volume are given at https://www.nist.gov/pml/owm/si-units-volume

You must read and agree to all Editorial Policies before you submit your manuscript. 

Categories of Manuscripts - See here.

The manuscript should be prepared in English using "MS Word" or similar word processing software. “Times New Roman” or similar font (size 12) should be used; single line spacing may be used.

Authors whose native language is not English are encouraged to ask colleagues familiar with the field of research and fluent in English (preferably a native speaker) to correct the language in the manuscript before submission. An article may be returned to the author without review if the language is not of an acceptable standard.

Metric measures should be used. Special symbols can be used but need to be carefully checked by the author at proof stage, because they may be altered due to incompatibility of files.

Hyphens ‘-’ are used to link words such as personal names, topographical names, some prefixes and compound adjectives.

En-dash ‘–’ (a dash the length of the letter ‘n’) should be used for ranges or spans. In the context of PST, it is mainly used for ranges of numbers, most frequently size ranges, elevation ranges, dates and page numbers.

Exclamation mark ‘!’ is used to indicate after the herbarium acronym to indicate that this voucher specimen has been seen by the author.

Multiplication ‘×’. The multiplication sign × is not to be confused with the letter x.

Title: Centered, Bold font, in sentence case. 

Abstract: Justified, not less than 200 and maximum 250 words.

Keywords: 4–6 keywords, separated by semicolon (;) should be written after the abstract, which can identify the most important subject of the manuscript, in alphabetical order. 

TEXT: All text should be justified (i.e., flush with the left margin—except where indented). The manuscript text may be divided into:

Introduction: A brief and clear description of the purpose of the investigation relating the previous research and essential arguments should be mentioned.

Materials and Methods: This section should be written well defined to understand the steps of investigation done which allows other researchers to reproduce the result.

Results: The findings of the manuscripts should be presented with appropriate evidence in a single heading or may be presented in separate headings depending on the requirement and need of author(s).

Discussion: The findings of the manuscripts should be discussed in a single heading or may be presented in separate headings depending on the requirement and need of author(s).

Conclusion: Mention conclusion of the study in few sentences.

Sub headings styles: See MS template file for details.

Reference: The journal uses the Vancouver reference style which is a citation style that uses numbers within the text that refer to numbered entries in the reference list. Your reference list should appear at the end of the manuscript with the entries listed in Arabic numbers and in the same order that they were cited in the text. 

Number of references: Limited to maximum of 100 for review articles and 50 for other types of articles. 

NOTE:- References within the text should start from 1. They should be cited under the References section in the order you have cited them in the text (ie. no need to sort the reference list alphabetically).

Tables and Figures: Tables need to have a title above the table and figures need to have title below the figure.

Tables are numbered consecutively with Arabic numerals and submitted separately from the text. They have a title and a footnote explaining any abbreviation used in that table. Footnotes to tables should be indicated by superscript lower-case letters. Double documentation of the same points in figures and tables is not acceptable.

Important: Obtain permission and include the acknowledgment required by the copyright holder if a figure is being reproduced from another source.

Save colour illustrations as RGB at max. 300 dpi (JPG or PNG preferred) which should be inserted in the manuscript file during submission and may be submitted separately after the manuscript is accepted for publication. All figures (photographs, illustrations or graphs) should be cited in the text, and numbered consecutively throughout (Fig. 1, etc.) and must be referred to in the text. Figure parts should be identified by upper-case letters (A, B, etc.), "I" or "O" are not used. Scale bars are included on illustrations with measurement. Figure legends must be brief, self-sufficient explanations of the illustrations. The legends (if any) should be placed at the end of the text.

All taxa newly described in the manuscript should be accompanied by a good quality line drawing. All lines and symbols should be of uniform thickness, and professional quality and proper dimensions (approx. 2 mm high after reproduction). All line drawings are scanned and submitted as 1200 dpi TIFF files.

Place Tables and Figures after References in the manuscript file itself (all text, tables and figures in one file).

Equations need to be left aligned; equation numbers should be right aligned; equations quoted in the manuscript need to conform to this form.  (Eqn. 1)

Taxonomy manuscripts
Make sure that the names of the author(s) of the plant names are abbreviated as per the "Authors of the Plant Names" by 'Brummit & Powell (1992)' and its subsequent online version of 2010.

NOTE:- Manuscripts reporting new species or other types of taxonomy articles need not use the above journal style. Instead, refer a recently published article in Plant Science Today and follow the style.

Image Raw Files
You may keep original raw files of the images with you and must submit if requested. A raw file is the image as seen by the camera's sensor. You may think of it like unprocessed film. Depending on the camera setting, it may be saved as JPEG, TIFF or other formats. You may submit it as supplementary material or keep it with you for verification by the PST editors/reviewers.