American Journal of Plant Sciences

About American Journal of Plant Sciences

American Journal of Plant Sciences

The American Journal of Plant Sciences, abbreviated Am. J. Plant Sci. and often shortened to AJPS, is an open access, peer-reviewed journal in the plant sciences published by Scientific Research Publishing, known as SCIRP. Its print ISSN is 2158-2742 and its online ISSN is 2158-2750. The National Library of Medicine cataloguing for the title gives the same abbreviation and identifiers, with NLM catalog number 101588963. The journal publishes original research papers and review articles across plant biology, and its volumes have reached volume 16 in 2025, a numbering sequence consistent with a title that began publishing in 2010. Articles carry SCIRP digital object identifiers in the form 10.4236/ajps, followed by the year and article number, as in the widely cited 2020 paper on rare and endangered tulips in the arid zones of Uzbekistan, DOI 10.4236/ajps.2020.115053.

This profile is written to be useful in two directions at once. For authors, it sets out what the journal publishes, how it operates as an open access SCIRP title, and what to check carefully before submitting — because the publisher's model and reputation are part of any honest assessment of this journal. For readers and evaluators, it explains how to weigh a paper that appears in AJPS: by the quality and transparency of the individual article, by the evidence it reports, and by independent verification of indexing and metric claims, rather than by the journal name alone.

Quick facts

Scope: what the journal publishes

AJPS takes the whole of plant science as its territory. In practice, analysis of its published contents shows three large centres of gravity. Botany accounts for roughly a third of the journal's research topics, agronomy for a little under a third, and horticulture for a little over a fifth, with the remainder spread across genetics, physiology, pathology, ecology and food-related plant work. Those proportions, drawn from Research.com's analysis of the journal's output, are a helpful guide to fit: this is a journal dominated by applied and descriptive plant work — cultivar trials, germination and seedling studies, tissue culture and micropropagation, field experiments with randomised block designs — rather than by molecular plant biology at the level of a specialist genetics title.

Botany and plant diversity. Taxonomy, systematics, morphology, anatomy, floristics and plant distribution studies are a long-standing strand. Special issues on plant diversity invited work on plant systematics and taxonomy, plant evolution and diversity, morphology, anatomy and geobotany, and genetic and species diversity. Distribution and conservation studies of particular species and regional floras — medicinal plants, rare tulips, resource assessments of wild plant populations — appear regularly, often from authors documenting the flora of a specific region in detail.

Agronomy and crop science. Variety evaluation, sowing and crop management, yield trials, heat and drought tolerance screening, and genotype studies under field conditions form the second large strand. Papers report multi-season field experiments from agricultural research institutes, such as evaluations of potato lines for heat tolerance and of wheat genotypes under heat stress, with the standard apparatus of replicated designs, trait measurement at set days after planting, and yield per hectare. Work of this kind is regionally grounded: the value of a trial lies in the match between genotype, soil, climate and season, and AJPS serves as an outlet where such locally important results can be published in full.

Horticulture and plant propagation. Germination, seedling growth, explant culture, micropropagation and related propagation work form the third strand. Studies using standard culture media and growth conditions, ornamentals, fruit and vegetable crops, and greenhouse production all appear.

Plant physiology, stress and pathology. The journal's most cited work sits here and in the areas above. Its most cited paper in Research.com's analysis, on cadmium toxicity in plants and the role of mineral nutrients in its alleviation, had gathered over two hundred citations; a paper on phytoplasmas and phytoplasma diseases as a threat to agriculture had gathered over one hundred and eighty; and a review on high-temperature adult-plant resistance for sustainable control of stripe rust had gathered over one hundred and sixty. Those examples show the journal at its most influential: review and synthesis work on plant stress, toxic metals, disease and resistance that serves readers well beyond the crop or region where the underlying experiments were done.

Reviews and special issues. Review articles are a significant part of the journal, and SCIRP runs special issues on set themes with guest editors and stated deadlines, announced through calls for papers on the publisher's site. Authors considering a special issue should apply the same checks as for a regular submission, and should confirm who the guest editor is, what the timetable is, and what charge applies, from the current call rather than from an older archived call — SCIRP special issue pages from earlier years remain online and are easy to mistake for current invitations.

How the journal operates

AJPS is published online by SCIRP as an open access title. Manuscripts are submitted through the publisher's paper submission system, and the publisher maintains journal-level pages for editorial policies, author guidance and special issues. SCIRP describes its handling of submissions, peer review, editorial acceptance criteria, author appeals and data availability expectations in its editorial policies material for the journal. Publication is frequent: recent volumes are organised in monthly numbers, so accepted articles appear through the year rather than in a small number of issues.

Open access here means free reading, funded from the author side. SCIRP journals charge article processing charges, and the amount for a given journal and article type is a commercial term that authors must confirm on the publisher's current pages before they submit, because charges change and because special issue arrangements can differ. This profile deliberately does not print a dollar figure for AJPS: a figure that could not be verified from the publisher's current journal pages at the time of writing would risk misleading an author into budgeting for the wrong amount. The safe practice is simple — open the SCIRP page for this journal, note the current charge and what it covers, save a dated copy, and only then submit.

Copyright and licensing for SCIRP open access articles follow the publisher's standard terms, under which articles are made freely readable online. Authors should read the licence wording attached to their own article and the publisher's current policy page, especially if a funder or institution requires a particular licence, and should keep the version of record's licence statement with their records.

Indexing, metrics and how to verify claims

This is the section where care matters most for AJPS. Research.com's journal profile lists its impact factor as not applicable and gives no SCImago SJR value for the title, while its content analysis credits the journal with highly cited individual papers. In other words, the journal has a real, citable body of work, but authors should not assume it carries a Journal Citation Reports impact factor or a Scopus-based quartile, and should verify any such claim, for the exact year they need, in the primary source — Clarivate's Master Journal List for Web of Science coverage, the Scopus source list for Scopus coverage, and SCImago for SJR and quartile — rather than accepting a number printed on an aggregator or marketing page. Third-party sites attach wildly inconsistent figures to this title; one page encountered during research for this profile paired the journal with an impact value in the hundreds, an obvious error that illustrates why primary-source checking is not optional.

The identifiers, by contrast, are stable and verifiable. Print ISSN 2158-2742, online ISSN 2158-2750, the ISO abbreviation Am. J. Plant Sci., and the NLM catalog entry 101588963 all agree across the publisher record and library cataloguing, and they agree with the ISSN values held in the Journals World record for this post. When checking whether a paper you have found is really an AJPS paper, match the DOI prefix 10.4236 and journal code ajps, the volume and year sequence, and the ISSN — that combination identifies the title reliably even where a web page is poorly formatted.

For an individual researcher's decision, the practical questions are institutional. Does your university, funder or national assessment system count open access articles in journals without a Web of Science impact factor? Does your institution maintain guidance, a watch list or an approval list that mentions SCIRP or this journal by name? Those local rules, not general reputation, determine whether an AJPS article will count for promotion, thesis-by-publication or grant reporting, and they should be checked before submission, not after acceptance.

Reputation, corrections and retractions — an honest note

An honest profile cannot omit the public record on corrections. Retraction Watch maintains a category for this journal, and its reporting includes cases in which AJPS papers were retracted for duplication and copying, including a case in which a retracted paper's notice was accompanied by a checklist describing what had happened. Retractions occur in many journals and a retraction handled transparently can be a sign of a functioning correction process; at the same time, a pattern of duplication cases is information an author is entitled to weigh. SCIRP as a publisher has also been widely discussed in scholarly publishing debates about open access quality control. This profile takes no side in that debate beyond the verifiable record: the journal publishes a large volume of peer-reviewed plant research, some of it well cited and useful, and it also has documented retractions that authors and readers can inspect for themselves.

The working conclusion for readers is to judge AJPS papers individually. Check that the methods are fully reported, that the design matches the claim — replication, controls, seasons and sites for field work; clear provenance for germplasm and specimens for botanical work — that data are shown rather than summarised away, and that the paper has not been corrected or retracted since publication. For authors, the conclusion is parallel: if you publish sound, fully reported regional or applied plant science here, keep your own accepted manuscript, data and submission correspondence, and record the article's DOI and licence, so that your work remains verifiable whatever happens to any single web page.

Who should consider submitting, and who should look elsewhere

AJPS is a plausible home for complete, competently executed applied plant studies whose main audience is practitioners and researchers working on similar crops, regions or propagation problems: variety and line evaluations, germination and culture protocols, flora and resource surveys, and reviews that organise a practical topic such as stress tolerance or a crop disease. Its breadth means a well-prepared manuscript in almost any plant subfield is within scope, and its monthly publication pattern and open access model mean accepted work becomes freely readable quickly.

Authors whose careers depend on publishing in a journal with a current Journal Citation Reports impact factor or a Scopus quartile, or whose institution discourages the publisher, should choose a different outlet, because no amount of article quality changes how a journal-level metric rule is applied. Authors with fundamental molecular findings aimed at the centre of a subfield will usually reach more of their intended readers in a specialist society journal. As with any author-pays venue, confirm the current charge, the peer review steps your manuscript will actually go through, and the expected timetable in writing from the current journal pages before you submit, and never pay an invoice that arrives before a documented acceptance.

Frequently asked questions

Is the American Journal of Plant Sciences open access? Yes. It is published by SCIRP as an open access journal, freely readable online, with author-side charges described on the publisher's site. Confirm the current charge for this title before submitting.

What are its ISSNs? Print ISSN 2158-2742 and online ISSN 2158-2750. Its standard abbreviation is Am. J. Plant Sci.

Does it have an impact factor? No impact factor is reported for the title in the Research.com analysis consulted for this profile. Verify Web of Science and Scopus status for the exact year you need in Clarivate's Master Journal List and the Scopus source list before relying on any claim either way.

What does it publish most? Botany, agronomy and horticulture dominate, including cultivar and yield trials, germination and propagation studies, plant diversity and distribution work, and reviews on plant stress, disease and toxic metals.

How can I tell a genuine AJPS article? By the combination of the title, ISSN, volume-year sequence and a DOI beginning 10.4236/ajps. Cross-check the article on the publisher's site and on Crossref.

Have papers in it been retracted? Yes, documented cases exist, including retractions for duplication, catalogued by Retraction Watch. Readers should check the current status of any individual article they cite.

Reading and citing AJPS papers well

Because the journal is broad and publishes at high volume, a reader benefits from a short routine when an AJPS paper is found through a search engine or a reference list. Open the article on the publisher's site and confirm the bibliographic spine first: authors, title, volume, number, page range or article sequence, year and DOI. Then read the abstract against the body. In field and laboratory plant work, the details that decide whether a result can be trusted are rarely in the abstract — the number of replications, the seasons and locations of a trial, the cultivar or accession identifiers, the culture conditions, the statistical test and the treatment of missing or failed plots. A paper that reports those details clearly, shows its data in tables that match its conclusions, and discusses its result against comparable published work can be used with confidence in proportion to that reporting, whatever a reader thinks of the publisher in general.

Citation practice deserves the same care. Cite the version of record with its DOI, check for a later correction or retraction notice before building an argument on the paper, and do not cite the journal itself as evidence of quality in a thesis or report — cite the paper's method and data. Where an AJPS paper is the only source for a claim that matters, such as the distribution of a rare species or the performance of a line under heat stress, look for corroboration in a flora, a national trial report or a later independent study. That is not a special rule for this journal; it is ordinary scholarly hygiene, applied here with the extra step of a status check because a documented retraction record exists.

For librarians and repository managers, AJPS articles are straightforward to handle: they are openly readable, they carry DOIs in a consistent publisher sequence, and their ISSN and abbreviation metadata are stable across the NLM and ISSN records. Catalogue them under the online ISSN for the electronic version, record the licence exactly as it appears on the article, and link the DOI rather than a session-based publisher address, so that the record survives platform changes.

Sources and verification note

This profile is based on SCIRP's own journal material for the American Journal of Plant Sciences, including its article and special issue pages showing the title, ISSNs, open access status and submission route and a 2025 article in volume 16, number 11; on library cataloguing summarised by Paperpile from the ISSN and NLM records, giving the abbreviation Am. J. Plant Sci., print ISSN 2158-2742, online ISSN 2158-2750 and NLM catalog 101588963; on Research.com's analysis of the journal for topic proportions and most cited papers; on Retraction Watch's category for the journal for the retraction record; and on the live Journals World record for this post, whose title, slug, publisher and ISSN values match those sources. No article processing charge and no impact metric is asserted, because neither could be verified from a primary source at the time of writing.