For authors
What the journal publishes, how to submit, and what a manuscript has to contain before it will be considered.
Article types
| Type | What it is | Typical length |
|---|---|---|
| Research Article | Original data with a stated method, full tables and an interpretation the data support. | 3,000–10,000 words |
| Methods Article | A new or adapted protocol, apparatus or analytical method, with data showing how well and how reproducibly it performs. | 3,000–10,000 words |
| Working Paper | An exploratory release, usually one run per condition, published to put numbers on the record. Labeled as such and expected to be superseded. | Any |
| Review | A synthesis of published work, including reviews of books and manuals relevant to American kava production. | 3,000–12,000 words |
| Monograph | An extended study of a single subject — original historical, analytical or field scholarship too comprehensive for a research article, often with primary-source exhibits or a proposed framework. | Over 15,000 words |
| Essay | Scholarly argument in ethnobotany, anthropology, history or commerce, with citations. | 2,000–10,000 words |
| Comment and Reply | A challenge to a paper published here, and the authors' response. Both are published in full and both are citable. | Under 2,000 words |
Before you submit
A manuscript will not be considered until it contains all of the following. This is not formatting pedantry: the documentation is what lets the editors, the reviewers and every later reader test the paper for themselves.
- A method a reader could repeat. Cultivar and plant part, plant age, source and lot, mass and volume with units, water temperature and time, equipment by make and model, and the number of replicates.
- Analytical provenance. Laboratory name, report or batch identifier, method (for example HPLC-DAD, HPTLC, NIR), and whether the method was validated for this matrix. Name the correction factors applied and say where they came from.
- Your own numbers, in tables. Enough that a reader can recompute your summary statistics. Derived values are welcome if the table note says they were computed rather than measured.
- Replicate structure stated honestly. Say where replicates are subsamples of one lot rather than independent units, where cultivar and lot are confounded, and how many runs were excluded and why.
- Limitations the paper actually has. State them where the analysis raises them. A limitations section that lists only structural constraints of the study design, without the specific weaknesses of these data, will be sent back.
- A conflicts-of-interest statement naming every commercial interest any author holds in the subject matter.
- A declaration of AI use, or an explicit statement that none was used.
- A data availability statement saying who holds the primary data and on what terms.
Manuscript format
Send a Word document or plain text. The journal typesets from your file; there is no template to fight with and no page charges. Include, in this order: title; a short title if you want one; authors with affiliations exactly as you want them printed; an abstract of 150–300 words written by the authors; five to eight keywords; the body; the declarations listed above; and references.
References in APA 7th edition, alphabetised. Every reference must be checked against the publisher record for volume, issue, pages and DOI — the journal verifies these and will return a manuscript whose reference list does not survive checking. Figures as separate image files at their original resolution, numbered, with captions in the manuscript.
How to submit
Email the manuscript and figures to submissions@journalofamericankava.org with the article type in the subject line. There is no submission system to register with and no account to create.
You will get an acknowledgment within a week and an editorial decision within about three weeks. Accepted papers are published as soon as they are typeset and checked; the journal publishes continuously, so there is no issue to wait for.
What happens at publication
- The article is typeset as HTML on this site. The full text is the published version; the journal does not issue downloadable files.
- Once the journal's Crossref prefix is issued, the article receives a DOI, deposited with Crossref together with its metadata and reference list, so that citations to and from the paper can be tracked. No DOIs have been registered yet.
- A summary or discussion of the work, written for growers and operators, may appear on the American Kava Association site, linking to the article of record here.
Rights
Authors keep copyright and grant the journal the right to publish the article and keep it available permanently.
Costs
There are none: no submission fee, no article processing charge, and no fee of any kind.