The effect of organic chelating ligand in the preparation of tri-oxide composite, 0.025La(2)O(3)-0.95SrO-(1/3)Co3O4, was investigated in this work. Two particular chelating ligand systems, citrate-based and salicylate-based, were studied here. As this composite possesses room temperature ferromagnetism, which is stimulated by the interfacial induction effect between Co3O4 and SrO domains, the attained magnetic properties are affected by the type of organic ligand system through its intervention with the microstructure of the metal oxide composite. The composite generated from citrate metallo-organic (MO) system offered a stronger ferromagnetism than the salicylate-based system though the later, when fabricated as a film, exhibited spike-like surface morphology. (C) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.