fcr-reporting-and-data-policy

Business

Use when preparing the reporting completeness and research-data materials for a Field Crops Research (FCR) manuscript. FCR requires a data-availability statement at submission, full agronomic reporting (cultivar, soil, weather vs. phenology, management, design), declaration of any generative-AI use, and supports data/methods co-submission to Data in Brief / MethodsX. Prepares the materials; it does not waive requirements.

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Reporting & Data Policy (fcr-reporting-and-data-policy)

FCR does not just want results — it wants the agronomic context that makes them interpretable and reproducible, plus a statement of data availability at submission. Build these as you go so they do not stall the submission.

When to trigger

Assembling the methods section for completeness before submission
Writing the data-availability statement required at submission
Deciding whether to co-submit a dataset/method to Data in Brief / MethodsX
Disclosing any use of generative AI in preparing the manuscript

Reporting completeness (FCR-specific)

A field-crop paper is reproducible only if the methods report all of:

Crop & cultivar(s) and, where relevant, maturity group / genotype identity
Site(s) & seasons with coordinates; the environments and what they represent
Soil properties (type, texture, relevant chemistry) for each site
Weather (radiation, temperature, rainfall) shown in relation to crop phenology
Management: sowing date/density, fertilisation, irrigation, crop protection, tillage
Experimental design: layout, randomization, replication, plot size, guard rows
Statistics: model, error structure, software/version (see fcr-data-analysis)
Yield data (encouraged) and the biophysical processes linked to it

Data availability (state it at submission)

Declare availability. FCR/Elsevier requires authors to state the availability of any data at submission; the statement is published with the article on ScienceDirect.
Share where possible. Deposit data in a recognised repository (e.g., Mendeley Data, or a domain repository) and cite it with a persistent identifier; FCR datasets are hosted openly under Creative Commons terms on Mendeley Data.
If data cannot be shared. State the reason (e.g., sensitive, confidential, or provider-restricted) in the data-availability statement during submission.
Co-submission. Standalone datasets or methods can be forwarded to Data in Brief / MethodsX alongside the article.

Other declarations

Generative AI. Declare any use of generative-AI tools in the manuscript-preparation process at submission, per Elsevier policy.
Ethics / authorship / conflicts. Standard Elsevier declarations (CRediT roles, competing interests, funding) where applicable.

Minimum agronomic metadata table (what an FCR methods reviewer audits)

A methods reviewer for a field-crop journal reads for reproducibility line by line. The gaps that draw "cannot evaluate" comments are predictable; carry this table so each item is on the page, not in a lab notebook.

Block	Must report	Why FCR cares
Genotype	cultivar name, maturity group, seed source/year	G×E claims need genotype identity
Environment	site coordinates, elevation, seasons, what each environment represents	defines the target population of environments
Soil	classification, texture, depth, pH, organic C, available N/P/K	yield response is soil-conditional
Weather	radiation, max/min temperature, rainfall, aligned to phenology	lets readers interpret G×E
Management	sowing date/density, N/P/K rate and timing, irrigation, crop protection, tillage	the "M" in G×E×M
Design	layout, randomization, replication, plot size, guard rows	error structure depends on it

Worked data-availability vignette (illustrative)

Illustrative; figures are for demonstration only. A multi-environment trial of two wheat cultivars across 3 seasons × 5 sites (15 site-years) reports grain yields of 4.2–7.8 t ha⁻¹ and a per-plot dataset of N rate, anthesis date, and yield. Drafting the statement: the plot-level table (15 site-years × 4 N rates × 3 reps ≈ 180 rows) is non-sensitive, so deposit it in Mendeley Data under Creative Commons, cite it with the DOI, and state "data are openly available at [DOI]." One site's soil-survey layer is licensed from a provider that forbids redistribution — for that layer only, state the restriction and its reason rather than leaving a blanket "available on request." The published statement must let a reader regenerate every yield mean and SED in the results. Check the repository and statement wording against the journal's author guidelines during the final upload-week pass.

Anti-patterns

A methods section missing soil, weather-vs-phenology, or management detail (not reproducible)
Leaving the data-availability statement blank or to the last minute
"Data available on request" with no reason and no repository where sharing was feasible
Forgetting the generative-AI declaration
Reported yields that the deposited data or analysis cannot regenerate
Depositing summary means only, so the plot-level structure (blocks, sub-plots) cannot be reconstructed

Output format

【Reporting complete?】cultivar + site/season + soil + weather-vs-phenology + management + design + stats? [Y/N]
【Yield data linked to process?】[Y/N]
【Data-availability statement】shared (repo + ID) / restricted (reason) — drafted? [Y/N]
【Co-submission】Data in Brief / MethodsX relevant? [Y/N/NA]
【Generative-AI declaration】[Y/N/NA]
【Next】fcr-writing-style

Supplementary resources

../../resources/external_tools.md — data repositories and reproducibility tooling
../../resources/official-source-map.md — data-availability, AI-disclosure, and reporting policy