African Journal of Microbiology Research

About African Journal of Microbiology Research

African Journal of Microbiology Research — A Full Profile

The African Journal of Microbiology Research, universally shortened to AJMR, is a peer-reviewed journal published by Academic Journals, carrying ISSN 1996-0808. Its publisher describes it as providing rapid publication of articles in all areas of microbiology, and its own journal pages have presented it as appearing weekly with one volume per year. That combination — a very broad microbiology scope, an African title and publisher identity, a high publication frequency and an emphasis on speed — defines both the opportunity the journal offers and the questions a careful author should ask before submitting. This profile sets out, from the publisher's own pages and verifiable records, what AJMR covers, what it publishes, how its manuscript requirements are written, how its publishing model works, and how an author should verify its indexing and standing independently before relying on any claim about it.

A note on honesty is needed at the start, because AJMR sits in a part of scholarly publishing where claims travel faster than evidence. This profile therefore separates three kinds of statement: what the publisher itself says on its official pages, which is quoted or closely paraphrased and attributed; what independent records show, which is identified as such; and what could not be verified from official sources, which is stated plainly as not publicly disclosed or as requiring a live check by the reader. Authors deserve that separation, especially where fees, turnaround promises and indexing logos are involved, here as at any journal.

Identity at a Glance

The ISSN is the anchor. The form printed on this Journals World record, 19960808 without a hyphen, is the same eight-character identifier as 1996-0808. Any site claiming to be this journal but using a different ISSN should be treated as a different — and possibly imitative — publication until proven otherwise.

The Publisher and the Journal's Position

Academic Journals is a publisher of a large family of similarly titled journals, many of them prefixed “African Journal of…” across the sciences, agriculture, medicine and the humanities. AJMR is one of the flagship titles in that family, devoted to microbiology. The publisher's description emphasises breadth and speed: articles in all areas of microbiology, published shortly after acceptance, with all articles peer-reviewed. Its archived issue PDFs from the middle of the last decade show the weekly rhythm in practice — numbered issues appearing at roughly seven-day intervals through the year — and the journal has published a very large number of articles over its lifetime, giving it a substantial archive in applied and regional microbiology.

That scale cuts both ways, and a balanced profile should say so. On one side, AJMR has given many researchers — including many based in African universities and institutes, and many working on locally important organisms, crops, diseases and environments — a functioning route into print with English-language, DOI-bearing articles; its article DOIs follow the publisher's registrant pattern, as in the 10.5897 prefix visible in its own reference examples. On the other side, weekly publication across an extremely wide scope is a demanding editorial model, and the quality signal an author needs cannot come from the publisher's own description alone. It must come from reading recent issues, checking independent indexing records, and confirming that the journal's current standing satisfies the author's institution. The verification section later in this profile explains exactly how to do that.

Scope in Depth

The publisher's aims and scope page names the core territory: environmental microbiology, clinical microbiology, immunology, virology, bacteriology, phycology, molecular and cellular biology, molecular microbiology, food microbiology, mycology and parasitology, microbial ecology, and probiotics and prebiotics, together with industrial microbiology. The fuller journal description widens the list considerably, adding protozoology, biotechnology, cell physiology, environmental biotechnology, genetics, enzymology, plant pathology, entomology, biomedical sciences, botany and plant sciences, soil and environmental sciences, zoology, endocrinology and toxicology. In practice, then, AJMR functions as a general life-science journal anchored in microbiology rather than as a narrow specialist title.

Core microbiology

Bacteriology, virology, mycology and parasitology papers form the centre: isolation and identification of organisms, antimicrobial susceptibility testing, prevalence and surveillance studies, characterisation of clinical and environmental isolates, and work on fungi and parasites of medical, veterinary and agricultural importance. The publisher's own reference example — an in-vitro antibiotic susceptibility profile of Salmonella enterica serovar Typhi isolated from human faecal specimens in a Nigerian metropolis — is a fair specimen of the journal's characteristic article: a defined organism, a defined place, a standard laboratory method, and results of direct local public-health relevance.

Applied, food and industrial microbiology

Food microbiology, industrial microbiology, probiotics and prebiotics, enzymology and biotechnology extend the scope toward application: microbial quality of foods and water, starter cultures and fermentation, enzyme production by micro-organisms, biodegradation and waste treatment, and screening of microbes for useful products. Such papers typically suit the journal when the methods are standard and clearly reported and the application context — a food system, an effluent, a local industry — is concrete.

Environmental, soil and plant-related work

Environmental microbiology, microbial ecology, soil and environmental sciences, plant pathology and related botany and plant-science topics account for a large share of the archive: soil microflora, rhizosphere studies, plant disease surveys, biological control, and the microbiology of polluted sites. Because the publisher's list also reaches into entomology, zoology, endocrinology and toxicology, authors in those areas do submit here — but they should recognise that the journal's core readership and reviewer pool are microbiological, and frame their papers accordingly.

Molecular and cellular work

Molecular microbiology and molecular and cellular biology, genetics and immunology complete the scope. Papers range from PCR-based detection and identification studies to molecular characterisation of isolates and resistance genes. The realistic expectation, visible from the archive, is for sound, methodologically conventional molecular work with clear results, rather than for the large-scale genomics programmes that gravitate to specialist sequencing venues.

What the Journal Publishes

The publisher defines its article types clearly. Regular, full-length articles should describe new and carefully confirmed findings, with research methods given in sufficient detail for others to verify the work, and with length kept to the minimum needed to describe and interpret the study clearly. Short communications record complete small investigations or give details of new models, innovative methods or techniques; the publisher puts them at two to four printed pages, roughly six to twelve manuscript pages, and notes that their section style need not follow that of full papers. Reviews and perspectives on topics of current interest are welcomed and encouraged, should be concise — the publisher suggests four to six printed pages, roughly twelve to eighteen manuscript pages — and are also peer-reviewed. Letters to the editor and commentaries complete the list.

These definitions tell an author a lot about fit. AJMR rewards completeness and clarity over scale: a finished small study, carefully confirmed, is the journal's native unit. Ongoing programme reports, fragments of larger studies without a self-contained finding, and manuscripts whose methods cannot be followed from the text sit badly with the publisher's own stated criteria, whatever the topic.

Manuscript Preparation, as the Publisher Specifies It

Unusually, the journal's author page gives concrete formatting rules, and following them exactly is the simplest way to avoid an immediate return. All submissions must be in good English — the publisher warns that poorly written submissions will be rejected at the point of submission — prepared in single-line spacing, at no more than twenty-five pages, with headings and subheadings unnumbered, major headings in bold block capitals (INTRODUCTION is the example given), and subheadings in normal title case. The International System of Units and accepted conventions and nomenclature should be followed. The title should be brief; authors' full names, affiliations (department and institution), emails and phone numbers are required. The abstract must be between 100 and 200 words, and keywords must number fewer than ten.

The required internal structure is conventional: an introduction stating the problem clearly and concisely; materials and methods presented so that the experiments can be reproduced; results and discussion, which may be combined or kept separate; and brief acknowledgements. Tables should be kept to a minimum, each with a short descriptive title, stated units of measurement and consecutive numbering, organised in Word or Excel. Figures and graphics should be prepared in GIF, TIFF, JPEG or PowerPoint formats, and both tables and figures must be cited in the text. A disclosure of conflicts of interest is required — authors should disclose all financial or relevant interests that may have influenced the study. References are listed alphabetically at the end, DOI links should be given wherever they exist, and names of journals must be presented in full, not abbreviated. The publisher also notes that authors of accepted manuscripts receive an Acceptance Certificate.

Two practical implications follow. First, the twenty-five-page ceiling and the preference for minimum necessary length reward tight writing; a bloated manuscript signals unfamiliarity with the journal. Second, the explicit English-language warning means authors writing in English as an additional language should budget for careful editing before submission — language is named as a point-of-submission rejection ground, which is blunter than most journals state.

Peer Review and the Publishing Model

The publisher states that all articles are peer-reviewed, and that papers are published shortly after acceptance in its weekly pattern. Review manuscripts are peer-reviewed as well. Beyond those statements, the editorial mechanics — reviewer numbers, anonymity model, average decision times — are not publicly disclosed in the material on the journal's own pages, and this profile does not invent them. Authors who need a dependable timeline for a thesis, promotion or grant deadline should ask the editorial office directly, in writing, before submitting, and should treat any third-party site quoting precise acceptance rates or decision days for AJMR with suspicion: those figures are not published by the journal.

Academic Journals operates an author-charges model for its journals, under which a handling or publication charge applies; the amount and the point at which it falls due are set by the publisher and can change, and they were not restated here from the pages consulted for this profile. The safe procedure is to read the current fee information on the official journal site, confirm the total in correspondence with the editorial office before acceptance, and pay only through channels the official site names. That advice is not a judgement on this publisher in particular — it is the standard defence against the imitation journals and fraudulent fee requests that target authors of many legitimate titles.

Indexing: Verify, Do Not Assume

Indexing is the area where AJMR authors most need independent checks, and this profile takes a deliberately strict line: it asserts no current Scopus, Web of Science or PubMed coverage for AJMR, because no such current coverage was verified from the databases themselves during its preparation, and the journal is not one whose name appears in the Directory of Open Access Journals as a matter of routine record. Historically, titles in this publisher's family have at different times appeared in, and disappeared from, various abstracting services and aggregators, and articles are widely discoverable through Google Scholar. None of that is a substitute for the only test that matters to an author whose institution requires indexed publication: searching the live source list of the named database, by ISSN 1996-0808, in the month of submission, and keeping a copy of the result.

Why such caution? Because the consequences of a wrong assumption are asymmetric. If an author publishes in AJMR for its speed, breadth and regional readership, and those were the real goals, the choice may serve them well. If the same author publishes assuming a Scopus or Web of Science credit that their university then refuses to recognise, the loss is a year of work. Journal-selection guidance from scholarly-communication advisers makes the same point generally: believe the database record, not a logo on a journal page; note that coverage can be discontinued; and match the journal to the paper rather than to a metric alone. AJMR simply illustrates why that discipline exists.

Who Should Submit — and Who Should Think Twice

AJMR fits authors with a complete, well-documented microbiological study of regional or practical significance: antimicrobial susceptibility and prevalence studies, food and water microbiology tied to a real setting, soil and plant microbiology, screening studies, and sound short communications reporting a finished small investigation or a useful method. It fits authors who value a weekly, high-throughput venue, whose institutions accept the journal, and who have read recent issues and judged the company their paper will keep to be appropriate. It has demonstrably served many Africa-based research groups publishing locally grounded work for an international, English-language readership.

Authors should think twice if their primary requirement is a current indexing credit they have not personally verified, if their study needs specialist statistical or genomic review beyond a general microbiology pool, or if their manuscript cannot yet meet the publisher's own stated tests — new and carefully confirmed findings, reproducible methods, good English, within twenty-five pages. Submitting a paper that fails the journal's published criteria, to a journal whose published model is speed, helps neither side.

Reading the Archive

The AJMR archive is a useful primary source for the microbiology of ordinary settings: market foods, municipal water, hospital isolates, farm soils, local fermentations and regional disease burdens that larger international journals often overlook as too local. Systematic reviewers working on African antimicrobial resistance, food safety or water quality will find studies here that exist nowhere else, and should appraise them individually, as with any source. Conversely, the archive's breadth means citation of an AJMR paper should always be a judgement about that paper — its organism identification, its controls, its statistics — rather than a judgement borrowed from the journal's name.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the ISSN of the African Journal of Microbiology Research?

1996-0808. The unhyphenated form 19960808 in some records is the same identifier. Use it to verify the journal and to distinguish the official site from imitations.

Who publishes AJMR?

Academic Journals. The journal's official pages are on the publisher's website under the code AJMR, and its editorial office contact, as published there, is ajmr@academicjournals.org.

What subjects does AJMR cover?

All areas of microbiology — including environmental, clinical, food and industrial microbiology, virology, bacteriology, mycology, parasitology, immunology, microbial ecology and molecular microbiology — and, per the publisher's fuller description, a range of adjacent life-science areas from biotechnology and genetics to plant pathology, soil science and toxicology.

What article types are accepted?

Full-length research articles, short communications of two to four printed pages, concise review articles (also peer-reviewed), letters to the editor and commentaries.

What are the key formatting rules?

Good English is mandatory; manuscripts should be single-spaced, no more than twenty-five pages, with unnumbered headings, an abstract of 100 to 200 words, fewer than ten keywords, minimal and consecutively numbered tables, and alphabetical references giving journal names in full and DOI links wherever they exist.

How often does AJMR appear?

The publisher describes it as published weekly, with one volume per year. Its archived issues from past years show that weekly rhythm in practice.

Is AJMR indexed in Scopus or Web of Science?

Do not assume so. Current coverage was not verified from the databases themselves for this profile, and any author whose institution requires such indexing must check the live source list of the named database by ISSN before submitting, and keep evidence of the result.

Does AJMR charge authors?

The publisher operates an author-charges model, but the current amount and payment terms should be taken only from the official journal pages and confirmed with the editorial office before acceptance; they are not publicly disclosed in a stable form that this profile can quote safely.

Summary

The African Journal of Microbiology Research is a broad, fast, high-volume microbiology journal from Academic Journals, built around complete small-to-medium studies — very often locally grounded, practically relevant microbiology — presented to its published format and reviewed for prompt weekly publication. Its strengths are breadth, speed, an extensive archive and accessibility to authors whose work might struggle to find a home in narrower titles. Its cautions are the mirror image: authors must format exactly as specified, write in strong English, confirm any fee from official pages only, and verify indexing status personally and currently rather than relying on reputation in either direction. Judged on those terms — neither inflated nor dismissed — AJMR is a journal an informed author can use well.