Publishing research from the malting, brewing, distilling and fermentation industries

Journal of the Institute of Brewing

A no-fee, open access journal publishing research from the malting, brewing, distilling and fermentation industries. Since 2023, the Journal has been published here  

Instructions to Authors (May 2024)

Overview
Submission
Structure
Style
References
Tables and Figures
Publication process

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Welcome to the Journal of the Institute of Brewing. I’m absolutely delighted you are considering submitting a manuscript (MS) to the Journal. I hope these instructions help you prepare for a successful submission. They may appear overly prescriptive but will facilitate the progress of your MS through the process. 

New for 2024! Short Communications for research and reviews

This is for small, rounded pieces of research or reviews.  Peer review and the usual style rules will apply but the text must be less than 2000 words in length with no more than 20 references and up to four Tables or Figures.  As the word count is demanding, the ’text’ excludes author contributions, conflict of interest, references and Tables/legends.

Your feedback and questions are always welcome.

Cheers,
David

Dr David Quain
Editor-in-Chief
david.quain@ibd.org.uk

For over 125 years, the Journal has been publishing original research relating to brewing, fermentation, distilling, raw materials and co-products. The scope of the Journal is the science and technology of beers, bioethanol, wines and spirits produced from cereals. Manuscripts on cider may also be submitted as they have been since 1911.

Manuscripts on fruit-based wines and spirits are outside the scope of the Journal.

There are no fees for either authors to publish or readers to read.  Publications are published under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) licence.

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Instructions to authors

Overview

These instructions to authors are not optional. Manuscripts will be rejected on submission without review which do not conform to these guidelines.

Similarly, as the ambition is to grow the status and reputation of the Journal, manuscripts will regrettably be rejected on submission without review if (i) they lack scientific or technical merit, (ii) are incremental and lacking novelty and (iii) are of narrow scope or are overly niche.

Submitted manuscripts will be subject to peer review with a minimum of two independent (and anonymous) referees. Contributions are in (UK) English and (original research manuscripts) must not have been published (or submitted) elsewhere. Authors must agree not to communicate the same material for original publication in any other journal. The Journal is published quarterly.

Both ‘reviews’ and ‘research papers’ are published in the Journal. Other than 'short communications',  there are no restrictions on the length of the manuscript or the number of figures or tables.  Figures in colour are encouraged!

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Submission

All papers must be submitted via the online system – ScholarOne - https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/JIB.

Authors are required to nominate four potential reviewers (with details of their institution and email address) upon submission of the manuscript. The suggested reviewers should have expertise in the subject, or the techniques used in the study.

IMPORTANT: Please check whether you already have an account in the system before trying to create a new one. If you have reviewed or contributed to the Journal recently, you will already have an account.

Copyright

The copyright of all accepted publications is transferred to the Institute of Brewing & Distilling.

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Structure

Overview

The main document consists of (i) title, (ii) authors, (iii) abstract, (iv) introduction, (v) materials and methods, (vi) results, (vii) discussion, (viii) conclusions, (ix) author contributions, (x) acknowledgements and (xi) references.

Place all Tables sequentially in the main document after the references.

Individual Figure should be uploaded as separate files.

Title

The title should be no more than 120 characters and 15 spaces. Please, no part 1, part 2 and no quote marks. With the exception of the first word and any taxonomic names (in italics), all words in the title should be lower case.

Authors

Present the author(s) in the form first name, initial (for middle names as required) and surname. Indicate the authors affiliation with a superscript lowercase number (1.2.3 etc) after the surname. Provide the address of each affiliation with the superscript letter preceding it. If any of the co-authors moves affiliation during the peer review process, the new affiliation can be given as a footnote. Identify the ‘corresponding author’ – there can only be one - with a  envelope symbol. Add the email address for this author only. Do not add phone details.

The journal requires the corresponding author to provide an ORCID iD when submitting a manuscript. 

The individual contributions of the authors to the manuscript (CRediT) must be added to ‘author contributions’ between the conclusions and acknowledgements. See here.

Running title

This is positioned in the header of every alternate page and should be no more than 54 characters + spaces.

Abstract

No longer than 400 words.  The abstract should be constructed in four sections using the following headings, (i) Why was the work done, (2) How was the work done, (3) What are the main findings and (4) Why is the work important. In the case of reviews (2) is not required. Abbreviations and acronyms should be avoided in the abstract and defined in the body of the manuscript (introduction onwards).

Introduction

This should provide sufficient background information for the reader to understand the rationale for the work and then follow the flow of experimental results and subsequent discussion.  Do not provide unnecessary detail on supporting processes and practices.  Cited references should be specific and underpin the work that is being reported. The introduction should not include sub-headings.  

Materials and methods

Sufficient detail must be provided to allow the experiments to be repeated. Similarly, the text should ‘headline’ the method to provide context. For example, ‘free amino nitrogen was determined using the ninhydrin method’ rather than ‘free amino nitrogen was determined’. Similarly scale and size/volume of equipment should be quantified. Supplies of consumables and equipment should be identified but, where appropriate, either grouped together or with minimal repetition of the details. Lengthy lists of microorganisms (and their details) should be presented as a table and not in the text of the Materials and methods. Centrifugation should be described as x g and not rpm.

Sub-headings should be used to separate the sections and should be in bold but unnumbered.

The description of any sensory analysis should include considerations such as ethical approval, lexicon/language, panel number, training and validation, scale, process, replicates and data analysis.

Whilst encouraged, statistical analysis of results should consider the likely understanding and appreciation of the interested reader. If the differences among means are large (> 3 standard deviations) there is no requirement to report statistics. If this is not the case, statistical analysis is recommended. Treatments which are likely to be less familiar should be explained clearly to enable understanding.

Results

This should include only the results presented in text, tables or figures. Data in tables should not also be presented in figures or vice versa. The focus should be on the data and should not involve discussion/comparison with other publications. This should be covered in the ‘discussion’. Ideally, the results will refer to few or no references.

Sub-headings may be used to separate the sections and should be in bold but unnumbered.

Discussion

The discussion should focus and build on interpreting and analysing the results relative to previously published work. Lengthy repetition of information from the Results (or the Introduction) should be avoided.

Results and discussion

To facilitate the effective discussion of the results, the ‘results’ and ‘discussion’ may be combined in the ‘Results and discussion’.

Conclusions

‘Conclusions’ are optional and should draw together the work in a simple and clear way. The Conclusions should add real value (consideration of the implications and future work) and not be a rehash of the Discussion.

Author contributions (CRediT)

The use of Contributor Role Taxonomy (CRediT) is used to describe the specific contributions of authors to a manuscript thereby providing recognition for individual contribution. List authors and their contributions eg

Author 1: conceptualisation, methodology, writing (original draft)
Author 2: resources, project administration, funding acquisition, writing (review and editing).
Author 3: writing (review and editing).

Please use the standard taxonomy to allocate contributions to specific authors. Terms include (i) conceptualisation, (ii) methodology, (iii) software, (iv) validation, (v) formal analysis, (vi) investigation, (vii) resources, (viii) data curation, (ix) writing (original draft), (x) writing (review and editing), (xi) visualisation, (xii) supervision, (xiii) project administration and (xiv) funding acquisition. Terms should be applied as appropriate.  Contributions must be real - avoid 'gift authorship'.

More information on CRediT and the shift from ‘authorship to contributorship’ can be found via https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.1210

Acknowledgements

All sources of funding should be reported here, for example ‘this work was supported by the [Funding Agency] under Grant [1234/19]’. Individuals should be acknowledged who helped in some way the work being reported.

Conflict of interest

Any conflict of interest (financial, personal etc) should be declared. If there are no conflicts of interest, then the following statement should be added - ‘the author(s) declare there are no conflicts of interest’.

Supplementary information (SI)

Is useful way to include important but ancillary information with the online version of an article. All supplementary text, tables, and figures should be combined into a single document. The SI should be cited within the MS (Fig. S1, Table S2). SI is supplied by the author and is published via a hyperlink 'as is'.

References

See References

Tables and Figures

See Tables and Figures

 

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Style

File types

Microsoft Office

Fonts

Calibri, Ariel or Helvetica.

Font size

12 pt.

Layout

Portrait (where appropriate, Tables can be in landscape).

Line numbering

Continuous + page numbering.

Justification

Align left.

Colour

Can be used in Figures (without cost!) – ensure satisfactory contrast.

Spacing

Single line spacing.

Paragraphs

Insert a line between paragraphs. Do not indent. Paragraphs should be more than one (or two) sentences. Look to group sentences that have a common idea, theme etc.

English - GB

It’s an ‘s’ not a ‘z’ so optimise, analyse, globalise, characterise, polymerise etc, etc. So, colour not color, flavour not flavor, sulphur not sulfur etc, etc. Set the language option in Word to English (UK).

English quality

Regrettably the quality of English in submitted manuscripts can be ambiguous or incomprehensible. Accordingly, if the English is poor, the manuscripts will be rejected without review with a recommendation for English editing. Accordingly, pre-submission, manuscripts should be carefully edited by a native English speaker. Better still use a professional editing service, it will cost but will make all the difference for submissions to this Journal (and others!) Use of such services will enhance the quality of the submission but have no impact on eventual acceptance (or not) which is dependent on the peer review process.

Abbreviations and acronyms

Please use carefully, sparingly or not at all! These will not necessarily be familiar to readers and excessive use of numerous different acronyms can make a MS unreadable! If used, mix up abbreviations and acronyms with the full wording to both remind the reader and minimise repetition.

Where abbreviations and acronyms are used, they should be defined the first time they are used and periodically across the manuscript.

Headings

Think carefully about headings in the main text, Tables and Figures. Avoid repetition (subject matter e.g. ‘beer’, barley’, ‘rice’, ‘yeast’) and being ‘wordy’.

Plagiarism

All Manuscripts are assessed on submission for ‘similarity’ using iThenticate Crossref Similarity Check.

Numbers

Outside of the Materials & methods, the norm is to spell out numbers below 10 (i.e. two not 2).

Decimal figures

More than two is excessive.  Are two decimal figures really justified? Maybe OK at g/L but unlikely at mg/L (and especially below).

Units

Use SI.

These are acceptable - mL, L, hL, μg/mL, mg/L, g/L, kg/hL, % (v/v), % (w/v), 1 x 10⁶/mL (and variants ‘cell’, ‘CFU’), °C, ABV etc.

These are not acceptable - brl (UK or US), g kg l-1, g kg.l-1, g/cm³, g.cm³ (and their variants), ppm, ppb, log CFU/ml, °F, abv etc.

Data

Don't overdo this. Increasingly manuscripts are being submitted consisting of tables of data which are many pages long. This is not a ‘good read’ so either prune your data, present it differently or include it as Supplementary information.

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References

System

Harvard using author's names in the text and listed alphabetically in the references.  Note that minimal punctuation is used.  For example, 'Vaughan A, O’Sullivan T, van Sinderen D.' rather than 'Vaughan, A., O’Sullivan, T., and van Sinderen, D.'

Order

The in-text citations are in the form of the authors and year of publication and the references at the end of MS are arranged alphabetically.

In text citations are as follows. One author, Boulton (2021) or (Boulton 2021). Two authors, Chenot and Collin (2021) or (Chenot and Collin 2021). Three or more authors, Filipowska et al (2021) or (Filipowska et al. 2021). Multiple references should be sequenced by year of publication (Van Oevelen et al. 1977: Bongaerts et al. 2021).   Two papers by the same authors should be ordered by date (oldest first).  Do not italicise ‘et al’.

In the references, the cited publications are arranged by year of publication (oldest first). Do not use ‘et al’ in the references – identify all the authors. Do not use ‘and’ in the list of authors.

Abbreviate Journal names

Use the NLM Catalog to find the required abbreviation.
Italicise but do not add a full stop/period for each abbreviation.

DOI

The Digital Object Identifier is required for all appropriate references. This facilitates direct digital access to the paper where available. The DOI should be based on the format of https://doi.org/10.

Language

References are restricted to publications in the English language.

Generic style - papers

Embashu W, IiLeka O, Nantanag KM. 2019. Namibian opaque beer: a review. J Inst Brew 125:4-9. https://doi.org/10.1002/jib.533

Wang J, Ding H, Zheng F, Li Y, Liu C, Niu C, Li Q. 2019. Physiological changes of beer brewer's yeast during serial beer fermentation. J Am Soc Brew Chem 77:10-20. https://doi.org/10.1080/03610470.2018.1546030

Formanek JA, Bonte P. 2017. Use of tannic acid in the brewing industry for colloidal and organoleptic stability. Tech Q Master Brew Assoc Am 54:11–6. http://dx.doi.org/10.1094/TQ-54-1-0112-01

Mertens T, Kunz T, Methner FJ. 2020. Assessment of chelators in wort and beer model solutions. BrewSci 73:58–67. https://doi.org/10.23763/BrSc20-01mertens

Generic style - books

Sampaio JP, Pontes A, Libkind D, Hutzler M. 2017. Taxonomy, diversity, and typing of brewing yeasts, p 85-117. In Bokulich NA, Bamforth CW (eds), Brewing Microbiology, Current Research, Omics and Microbial Ecology, Caister Academic Press, Norfolk, UK.

Briggs DE, Boulton CA, Brookes PA, Stevens R. 2004. Brewing Science and Practice, Woodhead Publishing, Cambridge, England.

EBC

Stewart D, Nischwitz R, Cole N, MacLeod L, Evans E. 1999. The impact of malt steeping regime on filtration efficiency. Proc Eur Brew Conv Congr. Cannes, IRL Press, Oxford, p. 493-500.

Publishers for the printed proceedings are Elsevier Scientific Amsterdam (2-15), EBC (publisher) and printer DSW Dordrecht (16,17) and IRL Press: Oxford (18-27). The 28th (2001) to 31st (2007) proceedings were published on CD by Fachverlag Hans Carl, Nürnberg.

Wilhelmson A, Laitila A, Olkku J, Kotaviita E, Vilpola, Fagerstedt, Home S. 2005. Oxygen deficiency in germinating barley. Proc Eur Brew Conv Congr. Prague, Fachverlag Hans Carl, Nürnberg, Germany, Contribution 6.

References that are only cited in the text

Websites, unpublished data, submitted manuscripts, personal communications and patent applications should be quoted parenthetically in the text and not included in the list of references.

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Tables and Figures

Tables

Tables should be created in Word and positioned at the end of the main document (after the references) - not submitted as separate files. Tables should be labelled sequentially and labelled with a clear, understandable title. The headings should be understandable without resort to the text or explanatory footnotes. Data should be centrally aligned beneath column headings. When reporting data with ‘±’, present as 20 ± 2 (not 20±2).

Figures

Figures should be supplied as TIFF, JPEG, PDF or EPS files. GIF and BMP formats are not acceptable. Figures should be presented at an appropriate size for (potential) publication and supplied as separate files (Figure 1, 2 etc). Multipaneled figures should be consolidated as one Figure/file. Minimum resolutions are 300 dpi for greyscale and colour, 600 dpi for combination art and 1200 dpi for line art. Quality will not be improved using a higher resolution than that recommended.

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Publication process

On submission

The submission is assessed for ‘scope’ and whether (or not) it follows the ‘instructions to authors’. Out of scope manuscripts will be rejected. If in scope but failing to follow the instructions, the manuscript will be rejected with an option for resubmission.

If in scope and following the instructions to authors, the MS will be sent for review by appropriate referees. These are selected from those suggested by the authors, the ScholarOne system or from searching Google Scholar for related publications.

Review process

The aim is for at least two reviewers to review a manuscript. On sending an invitation to a reviewer there are a number of outcomes. Best of all is ‘accept’ and failing that, a prompt decline is also good as this triggers the invitation to a further potential review. Less good is the invitation that is ignored which after a month ‘auto-declines’ which then belatedly triggers a new request for a reviewer. Although a worst case, it can take eight to 10 invitations to get two reviews.

The process for manuscripts which are esoteric will take longer. Firstly, appropriate reviewers need to be identified and, secondly, getting the reviewers to agree to review the MS. This is not intended to discourage the left field contributions but sadly it is fact of life that they take longer. Regrettably, the EiC will ultimately reject manuscripts if sufficient reviewers cannot be found who accept the invitation.

Rounds of review

Invariably, there are edits, changes or challenges that the authors are asked to address. The revised MS is expected back within a month and then usually goes back out to the original reviewers for a second look. Two or three revisions are the norm but can go (albeit rarely) to a fifth round.

Outcomes

Post review, manuscripts can be rejected outright or with a glimmer of hope (reject and resubmit). A much happier outcome is for the manuscript to be accepted for publication. The accepted MS is copy edited by the Editor-in-Chief (EiC) to minimise editorial changes in proof.

Proof

The pdf proof is sent to the corresponding author and EiC for final corrections and edits.

Publication

Prior to inclusion in an issue of the Journal, the paper is published online with an abstract, pdf and doi. Once published, no further changes to the article are possible.