Journal Guides7 min readUpdated Mar 25, 2026

Is Nature Reviews Cancer Indexed in PubMed? Yes, With Active MEDLINE Indexing

Nature Reviews Cancer is indexed in PubMed and currently indexed for MEDLINE, with coverage from volume 1, issue 1 in October 2001.

Associate Professor, Clinical Medicine & Public Health

Author context

Specializes in clinical and epidemiological research publishing, with direct experience preparing manuscripts for NEJM, JAMA, BMJ, and The Lancet.

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Quick answer: yes. Nature Reviews Cancer is indexed in PubMed, and the NLM Catalog shows that it is currently indexed for MEDLINE.

Direct answer

If you publish a review article in Nature Reviews Cancer, the article is discoverable in PubMed and the journal sits inside the active MEDLINE system.

The NLM record shows:

  • publication start year: 2001
  • PubMed coverage from volume 1, issue 1 (October 2001)
  • MEDLINE status: Currently indexed for MEDLINE
  • current subset: Index Medicus

That is a clean indexing record for a top oncology review venue.

Why this matters for Nature Reviews Cancer

The point of Nature Reviews Cancer is not just prestige. It is search-driven usefulness. The strongest pieces there often need to reach:

  • cancer biologists entering a topic
  • translational oncology teams
  • clinicians scanning a mechanism or therapeutic class
  • grant and review authors building field overviews

Those readers usually search by disease area, pathway, resistance mechanism, or therapy class. PubMed indexing matters because it helps the review surface in that real oncology workflow.

PubMed versus MEDLINE

For this journal, the distinction is still helpful:

  • PubMed means the review is visible in the main biomedical search interface.
  • MEDLINE means the journal remains inside the curated NLM journal index.

That matters because review influence depends heavily on whether readers can rediscover the article when they need a synthesis piece later.

What indexing does and does not tell you

This page answers the discoverability question. It does not answer whether your piece is the right article type for Nature Reviews Cancer.

Indexing tells you the published review will be visible. It does not tell you whether the article is invited, commissioned, broad enough, or useful enough for the journal’s editorial model.

That is why the better next reads are:

Practical verdict

Yes, Nature Reviews Cancer is indexed in PubMed and currently indexed for MEDLINE.

If your question is whether a published review will be visible in the oncology literature workflow, the answer is yes. If your real question is whether your article is commissionable or structurally right for the journal, that is the harder fit call. A free Manusights scan is useful when you want a first pass on fit before you shape the submission strategy.

References

Sources

  1. 1. Nature Reviews Cancer NLM Catalog record, NLM.
  2. 2. NLM Catalog help: current indexing status, NLM.
  3. 3. Nature Reviews Cancer journal page, Springer Nature.
  4. 4. Nature Reviews Cancer author instructions, Springer Nature.

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