How to Write a Nature Communications Cover Letter (With Template)

Nature Communications has a 9-day median to first decision. Most of that time is editors deciding whether your paper is interesting enough to send to reviewers. The cover letter is what they read first. It's the argument you make before the data gets a hearing.

Getting it wrong is easy. Most cover letters to NC read like an abstract with a title change. They describe what was done. What editors need to know is why it matters and why it belongs in NC specifically.

Why the Cover Letter Matters More at NC

Nature Communications processes roughly 30,000+ submissions per year across every scientific field. Editors are managing enormous scope. They can't be deep specialists in every subfield that lands in their queue.

Your cover letter has to do what the paper itself can't do as quickly: translate your contribution into language that a scientifically literate non-specialist can immediately assess. If the editor has to read 40% of your manuscript to understand what's novel about it, you've already lost.

The difference between a desk rejection and a peer review routing at NC often comes down to one thing: can the editor answer "why should someone outside this subfield care?" after reading the cover letter?

The Four Things Every NC Cover Letter Must Do

1. State the gap. Not what question you asked. What was genuinely not known. "The mechanism of X was unclear" is not a gap. "Whether X operates through pathway Y or Z in disease context D has been a 15-year open question in the field" is a gap.

2. State what you found. One sentence. Active voice. Specific claim. Avoid: "Our results suggest..." Commit to something.

3. Explain broad significance. Why should a physicist, ecologist, or materials scientist care that you solved this problem in biology? This is the NC-specific requirement. If the significance is only within your subfield, the paper may not belong at NC.

4. Confirm scope fit. One sentence explaining why NC specifically. Not "NC is an excellent journal." Why is this paper's scope appropriate for a multidisciplinary broad-audience journal?

NC Cover Letter Template

Dear Nature Communications editors,
[One sentence: the gap or unresolved question] [One sentence: your core finding, specific and claimed not hedged]
[Two sentences: why this matters to scientists outside your immediate field. What does it change in how the problem is understood or approached?]
[One sentence: why NC is appropriate for this paper. What makes this multidisciplinary or broadly significant?]
[Optional, 1-2 sentences: study design summary if complex. Only if it helps the editor evaluate scope.]
We have no competing interests to declare. [Preprint/prior publication disclosure if applicable.]
Suggested reviewers: [3-5 names, affiliations, emails. Optional but valued at NC.]
Sincerely,
[Corresponding author]

Keep it to one page. NC editors don't reward length.

What a Strong Opening Paragraph Looks Like: Two Examples

Weak: "The role of inflammation in cardiovascular disease has been studied extensively, but mechanistic details remain incompletely understood. In this study, we investigated whether pathway X influences disease phenotype Y."

Why it fails: Vague gap ("incompletely understood"), no claim (hedge with "investigated whether"), no significance.

Strong: "The inflammatory mediator X is elevated in 60% of heart failure patients, yet whether it drives disease progression or merely reflects it has been unresolved for two decades. We show here that X directly causes cardiomyocyte dysfunction through mechanism Z, providing both a mechanistic explanation for this clinical observation and a therapeutic target validated in human cardiac tissue."

Why it works: Specific gap, specific finding, direct claim, human relevance stated immediately, significance obvious to any life scientist.

Common Mistakes That Get Cover Letters Rejected

Passive voice throughout. "It was observed that..." "Experiments were conducted to assess..." Passive voice makes findings sound tentative. Make claims. Use active voice.

Summarizing methods instead of significance. Editors don't need to know you used RNA sequencing and mass spectrometry in the cover letter. They need to know what the science means.

Claiming novelty without stating what was known before. "This is the first study to show X" is only meaningful if you briefly state what was previously thought. Without the contrast, the novelty claim is empty.

Journal flattery. "Nature Communications is the ideal venue for this work due to its prestigious reputation and broad readership." Editors have read this 10,000 times. Skip it.

Too long. A cover letter over one page is a signal you don't know what your key points are. Cut.

How Long Should It Be?

350-450 words. Four to five paragraphs. One page maximum. The opener states the gap and finding. The second paragraph covers broad significance. The third covers scope fit and any logistics. Reviewer suggestions at the end.

Anything longer is diluting your argument. Editors are reading many cover letters. A shorter, sharper letter that makes its case clearly outperforms a longer one that buries the key points.

Pre-Submission Inquiry: Should You Do One?

NC does accept pre-submission inquiries for papers where scope fit is uncertain. Format: 200-word description of the study, findings, and why it's appropriate for NC. Response in 5-10 business days.

Worth doing when you're genuinely unsure whether the scope is right. Not worth doing for papers where the fit is obvious, because it adds a week to your timeline with no real benefit.

What Happens After You Submit

Nature Communications assigns manuscripts to an in-house or external handling editor within 1-3 days of submission. That editor reviews the cover letter and manuscript together and makes the triage decision: peer review or desk rejection.

If desk rejected: You'll receive a decision within 9 days (NC's median first decision time). The decision letter will typically say something brief about fit or novelty. If the stated reason is scope rather than quality, that's information you can use: another journal, not revision.

If sent to review: 2-3 reviewers are invited. NC tries to get review decisions back within 4-6 weeks of reviewer acceptance. Some submissions wait longer if reviewers are slow to respond. Total time from submission to first peer-review decision is typically 6-10 weeks.

Revisions: Major revision requests at NC often involve substantial additional experiments. NC doesn't expect revisions to be quick; typical revision cycles are 3-6 months. Minor revisions are usually resolved in 4-6 weeks.

Cover Letter for Different Submission Types

NC accepts multiple formats: Articles (standard original research), Letters (shorter communications for very high-impact findings), and Review Articles (mostly invited).

For Articles (most submissions): your cover letter should follow the structure above. Three to five paragraphs, one page.

For Letters: cover letters should be even more concise. The finding needs to be genuinely urgent and high-impact to justify the Letter format. State the finding and its broad significance in 2-3 paragraphs.

For Registered Reports: if submitting a registered report (where NC has evaluated the protocol before data collection), note the registration number explicitly and briefly state how the results match the pre-registered hypotheses.

Suggested Reviewers: Worth Including

NC accepts suggested reviewers and takes them seriously. Three to five suggestions is ideal. Format: name, institution, email. Note briefly why they're appropriate (field expertise, cross-disciplinary view).

Avoid: collaborators, co-authors from the last 3 years, people at your current institution, people who've publicly commented on this work. NC checks for conflicts.

Good reviewer suggestions can speed up the peer review routing step by giving editors a starting point. This is a low-effort, genuine benefit.

Final 60-Second QA Before Submit

Check these five lines before sending:

• Gap sentence is specific, not generic
• Claim sentence uses active voice
• Broad significance is understandable to non-specialists
• Scope-fit sentence mentions why NC specifically
• Word count stays under one page

This one-minute pass catches most preventable cover-letter failures.

Why This Works

Editors reading quickly are looking for signal density. A good NC cover letter increases signal density: clear gap, clear claim, clear broad significance, clear scope fit. Keep that sequence and your odds improve.

The Bottom Line

A cover letter to Nature Communications needs to make one argument clearly: here is what we found, here is why scientists beyond our field should care, and here is why this belongs in a broad multidisciplinary journal. Make that argument in one page, in active voice, with a specific claim in the first paragraph. The rest is mechanics.

Sources

• Nature Communications author guidelines: nature.com/ncomms/for-authors
• Nature Communications editorial policies: nature.com/ncomms/editorial-policies
• Clarivate Journal Citation Reports 2025

See also

• Nature Communications journal overview
• Is Nature Communications a good journal?
• Nature Communications submission process
• How to write a journal cover letter