Plant Protection (Iran)

About Plant Protection (Iran)

Plant Protection (Iran) — In-Depth Profile

Plant Protection, published with the subtitle Scientific Journal of Agriculture, is a peer-reviewed, open-access journal of plant protection science published by Shahid Chamran University of Ahvaz in Ahvaz, Iran. Its Persian title is گیاه‌پزشکی, and it has been published since 1975, making it one of Iran's longest-running specialist titles in the agricultural sciences. It appears quarterly, reviews manuscripts under a double-blind model, charges no article processing fee, and carries ISSN 2588-5421 and eISSN 2588-5936. Its official site is plantprotection.scu.ac.ir, and its Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) record — verified directly for this profile — confirms the university as publisher and the journal's no-fee, Creative Commons licensed model.

This profile brings together what a prospective author, reader or librarian needs in one place: the journal's identity and history, its publisher and editorial leadership as named on its official site, its detailed subject coverage, its review and ethics arrangements, its licensing and fee position, its attributed metrics, how to submit, how it differs from the several similarly named Iranian plant-protection journals, and answers to the questions researchers most often ask. Every fact is attributed to the source it came from — the journal's official site, DOAJ, or OpenAlex — and anything that could not be verified from a fetched source is stated plainly as such rather than guessed.

History

The journal's official about page dates its creation to 1975, when it began as the plant-protection outlet of the agricultural faculty in Ahvaz, in Iran's Khuzestan province — a region where date palms, sugarcane, cereals and irrigated horticulture make pest and disease research a practical necessity as much as an academic pursuit. For most of its life the journal published in Persian for a national readership of agricultural researchers, plant-protection organisation staff and graduate students, under the Persian title گیاه‌پزشکی, which names the discipline itself: the medicine of plants.

In its modern form the journal presents itself bilingually. Its official site carries a full English face: Persian articles appear with English abstracts, and English articles with Persian abstracts, so that its contents are discoverable internationally even though the journal's primary language, as DOAJ records it, is Persian. The journal has kept a continuous quarterly rhythm in recent years and a stable identity — the same title, the same university publisher, and the same disciplinary remit — across the decades covered by its archive, which its editors state will remain permanently accessible on the journal's own website.

That longevity carries a practical benefit for authors: a journal that has appeared under one title and one owner since 1975 offers an unusually stable citation target in a field where titles frequently split, merge or change names. Libraries in Iran hold long runs of it, its back issues inform current extension advice, and its archive functions as a record of how the pest complex of Khuzestan and of Iran more widely has shifted with cropping patterns, pesticide use and climate over five decades. Faunistic records, first reports with full supporting data, and long-run field studies — the kinds of paper that short-lived titles struggle to place — have a natural home in a journal with this memory.

Publisher and Ownership

The owner and publisher is Shahid Chamran University of Ahvaz, which also provides the journal's financial support; the journal's ethics pages state this ownership explicitly and note that the journal accepts no advertising and has no revenue source beyond the university. DOAJ independently records Shahid Chamran University of Ahvaz as publisher, with Iran as the country of publication. JournalsWorld's older template record stored the publisher as a numeric code; the named university above is the verified publisher, confirmed on the journal's own site and in its DOAJ record.

University ownership shapes the journal's character. It is a faculty journal in the best sense: edited by plant-protection academics at the university's Faculty of Agriculture, sustained as part of the university's research mission, and free to readers and authors because its costs are carried institutionally rather than recovered through charges.

Aims and Scope

The journal's official coverage list is unusually specific, and authors should read it as the operative scope statement. It accepts work in: plant mycology; plant bacteriology; plant virology; plant nematology; plant-associated microorganisms; plant–microbe interaction; insect ecology; integrated pest management; insect physiology, molecular biology and biochemistry; insect toxicology; acarology; insect systematics; biological control of pests and diseases; and stored-product insects and mites. DOAJ's subject classification places the journal in Agriculture (General) and Plant Culture, with keywords covering plants, pathology, mycology, insects and physiology.

Two article types are welcomed, per the journal's author guidance: full-length original research articles and short communications. Contributions must be original and must not be under consideration elsewhere. Work that sits outside the coverage list — general agronomy without a plant-protection question, pure food science, or veterinary topics — belongs to other journals, several of which are named in the comparison section below. The journal's centre of gravity is the biology, ecology and management of the organisms that damage crops and stored products in Iran and comparable climates, together with the natural enemies and control methods used against them.

Editorial Leadership and Governance

The journal's official about page names its leadership directly. The editor-in-chief is Professor Arash Rasekh, and the director-in-charge — the role Iranian academic journals give to the person legally responsible for the publication — is Professor Reza Farokhi-Nejad. Both are plant-protection academics, and editorial correspondence is handled through the journal's office at Shahid Chamran University of Ahvaz, with the journal publishing dedicated contact addresses on its site.

Governance follows the standard Iranian university-journal model: an editorial board drawn from the university and from plant-protection specialists elsewhere in Iran, manuscripts assessed by specialist referees, and oversight by the university as owner. The journal states that it is a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and follows COPE-aligned practice — a governance commitment examined further in the review section below.

Peer Review Process

Review is double-blind: the journal's about page states the method plainly, and its ethics pages spell out the confidentiality duties that follow — editors must not disclose manuscript information beyond authors and reviewers, reviewers must keep manuscripts confidential and must not use them for personal purposes, and rejected manuscripts are not retained for reuse. Manuscripts are screened for plagiarism with the Hamanandjoo and iThenticate services named on the journal's site, and authors must conform their submissions to the journal's template; the author guidance warns that a manuscript not presented to template will be returned for correction before it proceeds.

Practical expectations follow from this. Declare conflicts of interest before submission, as the journal requires; ensure all listed authors agree to the submission, since the journal asks for that confirmation explicitly; and expect the editorial office to check formatting and ethics statements before referees see the paper. No acceptance rate or median decision time is published in a form that could be verified for this profile, and any third-party figure should be treated with caution.

Indexing and Abstracting

The journal's DOAJ listing was verified directly for this profile: DOAJ holds a record for the journal under its Persian title, naming Shahid Chamran University of Ahvaz as publisher, recording no article processing charges, a CC BY-NC licence, and Persian as the journal's language. OpenAlex also flags the source as open access and as present in DOAJ, and resolves both of the journal's ISSNs to a single source record — a useful cross-check on the journal's identity, because several Iranian titles share similar names.

Beyond DOAJ and OpenAlex, the journal is a recognised title within Iran's national journal system and is read through the national scientific databases that index Iranian university journals. Claims about wider international indexing could not be verified from a fetched source for this profile and are therefore not asserted here; authors whose institutions require a specific database should check that database's current source list against the journal's ISSNs before submitting.

Impact Metrics (Attributed)

OpenAlex, resolving the source through its ISSN endpoint (source S4306537384), recorded 285 works and 22 citations for the journal at the time of checking, with an h-index of 2 and a two-year mean citedness of 0.0. Those figures need context rather than alarm: OpenAlex's own yearly counts for this source reach back to the journal's 1970s archive, its coverage of Persian-language agricultural literature is thin, and citation databases built on English-language sources systematically undercount a journal whose readership works mainly in Persian. JournalsWorld's older template record quoted an h-index of 5 from a different provider; the two numbers are products of different databases and dates.

The journal has no Clarivate Journal Impact Factor that could be verified for this profile. Its realistic standing is that of a national specialist journal: modest international citation visibility, a genuine and long-established readership inside Iranian plant protection, and value that lies in reaching the researchers and practitioners who work on the region's pests and diseases rather than in global metric rankings.

Open Access, Licensing and Fees

The journal is fully open access: its official site describes it as an open-access publication with full texts in PDF and XML, and its content is free to read on the journal's own website. Its publishing licence, stated on its site and echoed by DOAJ, is Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0): readers may share and adapt the work for non-commercial purposes with attribution, while commercial reuse requires permission.

On fees the position is unambiguous and doubly verified: the journal's own about page records no article processing charge, describing itself in its author guidance as a free-charge journal, and DOAJ's record independently reports that the journal has no APC. The journal is financed by Shahid Chamran University of Ahvaz and accepts no advertising. Authors should still read the current author guidance before submitting, since policies can change, but at the time of checking there is no charge to publish.

The Journal in Iran's Research System

Iran evaluates its domestic scientific journals through national processes, and plant-protection titles have been compared in published evaluations of Iranian agricultural journals: one such study, applying quality indices to the plant-protection journals available in 2014, found the Shahid Chamran title among the journals scoring on at least one of its five quality dimensions, in company with the Iranian Journal of Plant Pathology and the Journal of Entomological Society of Iran among others. The detail matters less than the context it gives: this is a recognised participant in a crowded national system, not an obscure faculty newsletter, and its papers form part of the record on which Iranian plant-protection research is assessed.

For the international reader, the journal offers something scarcer than metrics: primary data on the pests, pathogens and beneficial organisms of a major agricultural region, much of it published nowhere else. Records from Khuzestan's date-palm groves, sugarcane fields and vegetable production, and from Iran's wider cropping zones, appear here first and are cited onward into regional reviews and pest-distribution work, often through the English abstracts that make each paper discoverable.

How to Submit

Submit through the journal's official website, plantprotection.scu.ac.ir, using its online submission system. Prepare the manuscript exactly to the journal template — the editorial office returns non-compliant submissions — and write the abstract in both languages the journal requires, Persian and English. Choose the article type honestly: full-length original articles and short communications are the two welcomed forms. Confirm that every author agrees to the submission and that no conflict of interest exists among the authors regarding the manuscript, both of which the journal asks authors to settle before submitting; then follow the submission through the journal's system and respond to referees through the same channel.

Who Should Publish Here — and Who Should Look Elsewhere

This journal suits researchers working on the pests, diseases, weeds' natural enemies and stored-product problems of Iranian and West Asian agriculture who want a peer-reviewed, no-fee, open-access venue read by the national plant-protection community, with the permanence of a university archive behind it. Persian-speaking authors gain a journal that publishes their language natively while still exposing their work internationally through English abstracts and DOAJ.

It is a weaker fit for authors whose promotion or funding rules require a Journal Impact Factor or high international quartiles, or whose work needs an English-language international readership as its primary audience. Those authors should compare the neighbouring titles below — and should note carefully that those titles are different journals with different ISSNs, publishers and charges, despite the similarity of names.

Reading the Archive

Submission logistics deserve one more note. The journal's office works in Persian and English, its stated contact addresses are published on its site, and its guidance expects authors to correspond through the journal system rather than by informal channels. Authors from outside Iran can submit — the journal states that it welcomes articles in its fields from all over the world — but should write in clear scientific English, supply the Persian-facing elements the office requests during production, and allow for the journal's bilingual workflow when planning their own deadlines.

The archive on the journal's site runs from its twentieth-century volumes to the current quarterly issues, and the editors commit to keeping the whole run permanently accessible there. Recent issues show the coverage list in action: taxonomic and faunistic studies of insects and mites, fungal and bacterial disease reports, biological-control evaluations, and stored-product studies, mostly from Iranian agroecosystems, published in Persian with English abstracts. Browsing two or three recent issues is the quickest way to judge whether a manuscript's topic and depth match what the journal actually prints.

Similar Journals

Iranian plant protection is served by several easily confused titles. The Journal of Iranian Plant Protection Research (پژوهش‌های حفاظت گیاهان ایران, ISSNs 2980-8170 and 2783-5383) is Ferdowsi University of Mashhad's quarterly — a different journal from this one. Ferdowsi University also publishes the Journal of Plant Protection (مجله حفاظت گیاهان, ISSNs 2008-4749 and 2423-3994). The University of Tabriz publishes Applied Research in Plant Protection (ISSNs 2383-1855 and 2717-3178), and the Iranian Research Institute of Plant Protection sponsors the Iranian Journal of Plant Pathology. Outside Iran, the Turkish Plant Protection Bulletin covers neighbouring ground. Each of these has its own publisher, ISSNs and policies; check the record of the exact title you intend before submitting.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the journal's ISSNs? ISSN 2588-5421 and eISSN 2588-5936; both resolve to the same source in OpenAlex and anchor the journal's DOAJ record.

Who publishes the journal? Shahid Chamran University of Ahvaz, Iran, which owns the journal and provides its financial support.

Who edits it? The editor-in-chief is Professor Arash Rasekh; the director-in-charge is Professor Reza Farokhi-Nejad, as named on the journal's official about page.

Does it charge to publish? No. The journal's own pages describe it as free of charge and DOAJ records no article processing charge.

Is it open access? Yes, under a CC BY-NC 4.0 licence, with full texts in PDF and XML on the journal's site.

How often does it appear, and since when? Quarterly — four issues a year — and published since 1975, per its official about page.

What languages does it publish? Primarily Persian, with English abstracts for Persian papers and Persian abstracts for English papers; DOAJ records Persian as its language.

What are its citation metrics? OpenAlex recorded 285 works, 22 citations and an h-index of 2 at checking — figures that understate a Persian-language national title whose citing literature is itself largely Persian. No Clarivate Journal Impact Factor could be verified for the journal at the time this profile was prepared.

Sources consulted for this profile: the journal's official website (about, author guidance and publication-ethics pages at plantprotection.scu.ac.ir), the DOAJ record resolved through the DOAJ search API for ISSN 2588-5936 / 2588-5421, and the OpenAlex source record S4306537384 resolved through the ISSN endpoint. Metrics are attributed to their providers and were checked at the time of writing; verify current values on the official site before relying on them.