WPSA Guidelines for the Preparation and Submission of Abstracts

A one-page summary allows the reviewers to referee your proposed paper for scientific content, ethics, presentation and relevance. It will be published in the series British Poultry Abstracts and must be suitable for use as a scientific reference. If the paper is not presented at the conference it will not be included in the edition of BPA. Previews or literature reviews will not be accepted. Only papers based on original research will be considered. Summaries should be complete in themselves and may contain graphs/tables, which will complement the text. Please ensure all authors are in agreement with being identified as being associated with the paper. The summary should be discussed with any co-authors and read critically by a colleague who has not been closely involved. Authors will be asked to rewrite substandard summaries or the summary may be rejected. Changes and corrections in titles and authors after submission, other than those requested, are to be avoided.

⚠️ The abstract submission should not be longer than one A4 page with all page margins set to 1.5cm. Please read the submission instructions carefully. Submissions which don’t comply with the specified format will be returned to authors for amendment or the submission may be rejected.

Submission title

The title should be descriptive, specific, and concise. It should also state the animal species concerned. The title should be a maximum of two lines (Times New Roman, Size 12, lower case, Bold font) and not have a full stop (period) at the end. No abbreviations please.

Authorship

All the authors of a paper should include their initials and last name (Times New Roman, Size 10, all UPPER case). One author should be identified as the corresponding author with an asterisk (*) and their email address should be included. The affiliations of all named co-authors should be the affiliation where the research was conducted. If any of the named co-authors moves affiliation during the peer review process, the new affiliation can be given as a footnote. Please note that no changes to affiliation can be made after the article is accepted.

Main text

Please use Times New Roman, Size 10. Please avoid non-standard abbreviations where possible.

Please ensure that British – UK English spelling is used.

The different sections (application, introduction, material and methods, etc.) should be separated by one clear line; section headings should be in bold, capitalised and centralised. Text should begin on the next line after the heading (see Example Abstract below).

APPLICATION should be a maximum of two lines of text and should explain the expected importance or commercial, economic, environmental and or social impact of the work.

INTRODUCTION should state the background and objectives of the work.

MATERIAL AND METHODS should describe clearly the methods used, including numbers and types of animals. A statement regarding verification that a committee on animal care in research has approved the experimental design and procedures involved. It should also describe all statistical analyses conducted. Authors must adhere to SI units. Units are not italicised. The experimental design and statistical methods must be clear: vague statements such as “the data were analysed using Minitab” are not acceptable. Experiments where treatments and pens (or groups) of animals are confounded are not acceptable.

RESULTS obtained, together with relevant statistical analysis, should be presented in sufficient detail to support the conclusions drawn. Treatment means should be presented with appropriate standard errors of means or differences. The minimum number of decimal places required to demonstrate statistically significant differences should be used. Probability values must be presented to support conclusions. Probability levels of P>0.05 are NOT statistically significant.

The use of percentages should be avoided wherever possible; concentrations or compositions should be expressed as mass per unit mass or mass per unit volume; decimal proportions should be used for common ratios such as, for example, diet digestibility coefficients.

The results of surveys will be accepted if the work is original research, rigorously designed, executed and statistically analysed.

For further guidance, please follow the guidelines given by the journal ‘Animal’ (published by Elsevier) Animal Science (animal-journal.eu)

CONCLUSION should reflect the original objective(s) of the work and clearly state the author’s view of the implications of the results to scientific understanding and practical use. Vague sentences are not acceptable. A discussion is not required.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Please ensure that funders of the work are acknowledged.

REFERENCES
Studies cited in the body of the summary should refer to the Author(s) and the year of the study (e.g. Smith et al., 2005). The list of references presented at the end of the summary should include: Author(s) surname and initials, year, full title of the journal volume pages.

e.g.: Livesey, C., Harrington, T., Johnston, A. M., May, S. A. and Metcalf, J. A. (1998). Animal Science 67, 9-16.

For further guidance, please follow the Chicago Author-Date reference style with the modification that, where a paper has 3 or more authors, the in-text citation should cite the first author only (e.g. Smith et al., 2005).

References should be listed alphabetically by first author surname. No more than 5 references should be given.

Tables

Should be numbered sequentially with a caption

Figures

All coloured images/figures should be saved as a flat JPEG file with no layers. High resolution (minimum 300dpi).

Commercial Products

Where results on commercial products are being presented, authors should ensure, before submitting their summary that both their organisation and the commercial company involved give permission to publish. Any product names should only be used once in the text.

⚠️ Before submitting a summary please refer to and tick the intereactive check list items below:

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Example Abstract

Please note the formatting in the example below may not fully match what is possible within Microsoft Word and/or PDF files.

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